The House That Map Built: A Play
A clip from Janet Jackson`s `Nasty`, from the album Control (1986), which features the line, `My first name ain't baby, it's Janet - Miss Jackson if you're nasty.` The sequence is repeated while the Greenius, wearing a white nurse`s cap with a red cross on it, performs the dance routine.
Greenius: `My first name ain't baby, it's Janet - Miss Greenius if you're nasty.`
Act I
Scene I
Inside a building amongst monitoring and surveillance equipment such as that kept for ensuring the security of inhabitants and/or guests. Surrounded by more than the usual home comforts that security guards like to place about themselves to make their workplace `homey`, it`s clear that, despite the inordinate display of spy technology, it`s a homebody`s centre of operations rather than workspace for an employed security agent. The figure seated in front of a variety of monitor screens lounges carelessly, but not inattentively, to what is transpiring on the haphazardly constructed viewing console platform containing several tiers of televisual apparatus. The jacuzzi and several features that provide a setting for growing cactus and flowering plants, including palms with dates and coconuts, tell the viewer that the owner is obsessed with personal space rather than that he`s an employee of a security agency.
Screen II
One of the screens flashes green before it colors up again and the observer notches a remote control and swivels in his chair to listen.
Green Screen 1: `Hi MAP. How`s Yu?`
MAP: `Yu`s fine. She`s out. I`m minding my own business.`
Green Screen 1: `We’ve installed the sonics in three structures with the appropriate vibrational acoustics,`
Twelve monitor screens have gone green and now there are twelve heads listening attentively to the conference.
MAP: `Churches.`
Scene III
A scene inside a cathedral, or some large ecclesiastical structure, filled with the sound of a congregation sounding aspirational with the hymn `God Moves In A Mysterious Way` written by English poet William Cowper in 1774.
`God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.`
Scene IV
The viewer is meant to perceive that MAP`s interlocutors are somewhat long winded. Necessarily so, because it`s their role as flunkies to make sure all of the details are available to MAP, just as Ministers are briefed fully by Private Secretary`s in the UK Parliament before they face the responsibilities associated with decision making or winning debates over factual matters. MAP`s responses are annotative and peremptory so that he`s able to take notes mentally and speed along the discussion and information gathering while he processes what`s relevant for him so that he can act and decide as an informed individual rather than rely on instinct and his own expert learning. He isn`t disrespectful. Only impatiently tolerant. Another head of the technological hydra speaks.
Green Screen 2: `The artwork is in accordance with those archetypal contents of the collective human brain that we had to `trigger` in order to produce the ‘historical projection’ effect.`
Scene V
The viewer is shown a variety of gargoyles on a church facade and then the interior followed by a montage of iconic figures from the movies, especially sex symbols, including Traci Lords, before we see a computer screen and the Microsoft IE (Internet Explorer) icon for accessing pornography on the internet, and so we see innocuous footage of Traci Lords` What Gets Me Hot (1982) online.
MAP: `Icons.`
A head looking as if it belonged in a hole in the ground on Easter Island speaks.
Green Screen 3: `Traci is what Carl Jung, the great development psychologist, called the anima, a soul figure that dwells within the human psyche as that eternal aspect of the human individual associated with immortality and the continuation of life after death. The meaning of icons is associated with the desire for immortality and racism. The eye is conned, as it were, by the criminal slaver, who wants us to race after something in order to render our lives pointlessly fruitless to us at the last, while the director takes the prize. Traci is noteworthy for her physical approach towards the medium, which again is a racist proposal that, if a girl takes enough cock in her, she`ll be rewarded for her physical labor, whereas it`s more likely she`ll be a burned out shell by the time she`s twenty; unless she`s reincarnated for a further bang at it. Human bodies are capable of only two things physically, and it`s what they`re designed for; eating and sex. All else is a slaver`s race against the individual having time enough for themselves to escape the insignificant death that the racist has planned for humanity. Instead of bringing home the bacon, the slaver metaphorically (or otherwise) puts Traci and her sisters in a tin as internet spam and eats her.`
Scene VI
The scene is of an airport at which the British pop group, Spice Girls, are anticipatedly advertised as passing though and will do a record signing when they arrive, `SPICE GIRLS HERE SOON. RECORD SIGNIINGS AT VAGINA MEGASTORE 2. 30 PM`. There are scenes of men and not a few attractive looking women passing through the departure areas. Luggage examiners with x-ray machines while armed security guards look on readily. The people are herded from baggage checking to passport control like animals going to slaughter, and the dehumanizing scenes are followed by scenes from an abattoir in which the animals are herded through to their doom before being hung on hooks after the butchery. Newspaper headlines featuring `AIR RAGE ABOVE HEATHROW` and reportage featuring Paris Hilton`s brother Conrad`s arrest for threatening to kill all of the flight crew of British Airways Flight 269 airliner he was traveling inside on July 31, 2014, precede the inevitable footage of 9/11 where planes crash into the Twin Towers of the New York World Trade Centre `live on CNN`. Footage of the Spice Girls singing from their video performance of `Spice Up Your Life` concludes the sequence:
`Colors of the world
Spice up your life
Every boy and every girl
Spice up your life
People of the world
Spice up your life, aahh.`
MAP: `Okay, so Traci`s an icon that encourages us all to race like pigs over a cliff. Got it.`
Green Screen 12: `The three venues that contain the newly installed sonics are a triumvirate of architectonic excellence resurrecting the essence of Medieval Europe in the shape of a refurbished Gothic chapel in the heart of Budapest’s `downtown` 8th district, a Shinto shrine created somewhat whimsically in the foyer of the Sonypan building in Student’s Square, and a Hindu temple replete with pornographic statuary and houri holos in Buda’s Robika, formerly known as Moszkva Tér, and which used to translate for Western democracies antipathetic to Russian rule in Eastern Europe as `Moscow Square`.`
MAP: `Churches - again.`
Scene VII
The scene is of a Medieval Gothic chapel in Pest, Budapest, Hungary, which shifts after a period of recording the interior on film to similar scenes of a carefully constructed Shinto shrine in the foyer of the Sonypan building in Deak Tér, that is, Student`s Square, in Pest, and a Hindu temple replete with pornographic statuary and houri holos in Moszkva Tér at the other side of the river Danube in Buda.
Scene VIII
The stony-faced head continues.
Green Screen 3: `Each construction, though new, is careful to maintain the principles of the original builders, which is to say that, if these forms of worship system had been allowed to develop organically instead of becoming atrophied or extinct, then those forms would bear more than a passing resemblance to the Gothic, Shinto and Hindu transmitting stations now projecting the prayer energies of their devotees in EurAmAsias Budapest.`
Scene IX
We see the devotions of the prayerful at the locations and the spirit bodies of the people who`re indicative of their cultures` resurrected within the view of the camera eye. Because fod and sex are what the human body is designed for, although there`s a distinctive cultural veneer relating to regional prevalence and ethnicity, most of the spiritual bodies` activities relate to food and sex. Because that`s what humans are for.
MAP: `Churches - with bells on.`
Scene X
There`s a scene taken from the movie, The Exorcist (1973), in which actress Linda Blair, as `Regan`, vomits while her head spins round 360 degrees and she clutches a crucifix as a priest speaks powerful prayers over her.
Scene XI
A female head mouths fish-like.
Green Screen 4: `Results so far indicate that the atmosphere in the immediate environment of our experimental ‘laboratories of the spirit’ is changing the fabric of what passes for reality in the first citystate of the Pan American Eur-Asian Confederacy, that is, we've begun to hear reports of black magic, UFOs and drug orgies.`
MAP: `Sorcerers, saucerers and...er...sauciness.`
Scenes of UFOs descending with silver suited space aliens disembarking or little green men and other types and varieties commonly supposed to emerge from flying saucers. The iconic Traci Lords` movie What Gets Me Hot is featured again innocuously and stereotypical Hollywood Babylon drug orgy scenes, whether actual or mock. The scene concludes as a smiling husband and wife sit at a dinner table with their two regulation kids and spear and chew thoughtfully with their forks at the undistinguished meat. It`s surreal.
Scene XII
Three heads simultaneously.
Green Screens 3, 6 and 9: `We're going to send you to investigate.`
MAP: `Thanks.`
A head in a very bad wig.
Green Screen: 4: `But we want you to pay a visit to the Jung-Usher Institute in Zurich, to receive a new enhancement programme for your borg component.`
Scene XIII
Hugely impressive depiction of the elaborate facade, walkways, gateway, and portico of the Jung-Usher Institute in Zurich.
Scene XIV
MAP: `Thanks - again.`
A head seems to be being ventriloquized because, so far as the audience can tell, no lips move.
Green Screen 5: `You’re to be fitted with a tesseract holo,`
An unenthusiastic head’s face enthuses.
Green Screen 7: `It’s rather like a mobile home, except it can be turned on and off as and when you require it, an extension of the ‘backlash’ principle - except it’s carried around inside.`
MAP: `Evolution.`
A head or three gape.
Green Screens 3, 6 and 9: `Sorry?`
MAP: `The first creatures on Earth were invertebrates, molluscs, protection was external, an exoskeleton, snails, for example; later came the vertebrates, internal protection, skeletal frames, bones, that is.`
Scene XV
Depictions of invertebrates, molluscs, and snails followed by a drawing of the `leech like clot`, which is how the Koran of Islam describes the human foetus prior to development. Then a man in a business suit, wearing a bowler hat and clutching an umbrella in the bright London sunshine. Beneath the screen appears the legend, LEECH LIKE CLOT?
Scene XVI
Heads nodded sagely in unison.
Green Screen 3: `I see.`
Green Screen 6: `Evolutionarily speaking, internal housing-`
Green Screen 9: `- is the logical way to go,`
MAP: `Churches.`
There`re scenes of young women, and apparently young women, inside what looks like an ancient Egyptian temple and the camera angle expands as the eye of the director leaves through the portico out into the `Egyptian` city which is revealed to be full of women wearing perfume and not much else.
Scene XVII
A head inclines and the rest follow suit.
Green Screen 10: `Hm?
MAP: `My body is a temple.`
Green Screen 11: `Hmmm. Well, your...er...`temple` will be trans-dimensional. Operating in an internalised dream-space where the laws of the space-time continuum are in abeyance access to the physical world is reduced to a simple decision-making process, for example, where do I. want to be? We’ve made it even easier for you by incorporating doors within your ‘holo insides’ through which you can ‘visit’ real space.`
MAP concludes concluding the conference.
MAP: `Father away from his church,`
Green Screen 12: `Does that conclusion conclude everything? I haven`t had my say.`
MAP: `In conclusion, what do you have to say?`
The head on monitor 12 turns to look at a headless monitor to the right where a GNT Global Network Television popumentary is being relayed to those on the planet who`re interested enough to subscribe to the channel`s output.
Scene XVIII
The GNT popumentary mouthpiece inside a studio narrating the story. He`s pacing in front of a studio audience, appearing thoughtful and dynamic by turns, and there`s a large projection screen behind him to which he turns expectantly before and after he finishes speaking to this listeners.
GNT popumentary mouthpiece: `Professor Usher had personally supervised the implanting of the holo projectors into MAP’s retinal cavities.`
Scene XIX
We see the professor at the University of Optics and Applied Sight Engineering personally supervising the installation of the holo projectors into MAP`s retinal cavities.
Scene XX
There`s a flashback to a previous interview with the patient MAP.
Prof: I must carefully explain the difference between the hard light externality and the newly functioning dark light system. What we perceive as reality is made up of particles, photons mainly, fluctuating wave forms, more fluid in the case of living beings, less so in the case of inanimate material, which is why chairs don’t ask you to stand up for a while because they’re tired. Dark light works in a similar way, but it’s more malleable, dreamstuff if you like. A darklight system allows the user to create a world that is real for him/her internally, an environment as `real` as the one outside. I can show you.`
The professor takes MAP to a room further along the corridor where he puts him in a seat facing what looks like a proscenium where actors perform. Although there`s no stage set or dramatis personae, when the Professor activates the seat`s functionality characters appear inside the proscenium.
Prof: `This is what you`re doing inside you at the moment. If you can order your thoughts, you can order what`s going on inside you. At the moment, you`re engaged in a relationship with the woman you see on the stage. She`s living in what you imagine for her. Consequently, the secret of imagining is to imagine a life with her inside you.`
Scene XXI
The woman on the stage is semi-nude and engaged in ascending a staircase that is taking her upwards past various statuary and artifacts that seem to represent her civilization though it isn`t one that MAP recognizes. The man ahead of her isn`t visible to him but he and the audience are meant to presuppose that he`s there.
MAP: `Imagining,`
Prof: `In the late 20th century it was discovered that racism was behavioralism. If a person was being raced rather than raised, their behavior was under suspicion until they`d raced to a finish line, which was usually close to the time of their death, and so behavioralism was served by the race to the death, and that was competition lauded as a panacea by socio-economic theorists who espoused the rat race formula for human failure. Consequently, human failings were what racists worked on. The more disabled the runners, the more the runners competed in the racism. Body fascism was but one method of persuading the runners that they were inadequate and needed to try harder to win the racism. Competition between males mean that the imagination was primarily directed towards an active outside life and a personal inner space, which meant that the inner world was subject to the same laws of nature, that is, males competed for the inner space, where the soulmate attempted to live with the brain`s imago of itself, which with the male ego is a hero figure. Like you, MAP.`
MAP: `Me.`
Scene XXII
There`s old news footage from France`s Pathé of Jessie Owens, the United States of America`s black athlete, winning the 100 meters footrace in front of an angry National Socialist Germany`s frowning Chancellor Adolf Hitler in 1936 prior to the Nazis invasion of Poland and the beginning of their Second World War (1939-45) attempt to enslave Europe and exterminate God`s people from the Bible in death camps, which are also seen.
Prof: `Because men project an external struggle with each other as an internal struggle for possession of their own personal space, the inner space soulmate is in danger of being contaminated by a variety of different male imago struggling like a virus for your personal space in order to be with her. The simplest solution is to be her daughter in your imagination so that she is surrounded by daughters that don`t threaten her space or yours.`
MAP: `Don`t be a germ, and be a good door to her.`
Scene XXIII
The viewer sees MAP`s inner sanctum containing all of the women this time in a Roman setting but there`s something wrong. Men begin to appear in the scenes with the women and Traci Lords` What Gets Me Hot features again in the popumentary style of the director before we see images from the film All Quiet On The Western Front (1930) in which the German machine guns decimate the ranks of the British Tommy marching stoically towards their trenches. The scene changes and MAP`s temple is revealed totally denuded of women while men lounge in dark suits wearing bowler hats and embracing their umbrellas as the city`s grand architecture burns.
Scene XXIV
There`s a short animate feature in which Hoppy the HIV meets Faye the Phagocyte in a white bikini dress who`s supposed to eat him as a form of bacteria but Hoppy smoking a big cigar gives her `high five` and shows her two fingers in a victory `V` Churchillian salute, which woos Faye into letting him stay. Ruby the Redemptive Red Cell in her red leotard isn`t happy with Faye but accepts the relationship. Soon he`s Hoppily machine gunning the white and red cells, Faye and Ruby.
Faye: `I`m just decimated.`
Ruby. Even more archly than Faye.
Ruby: `I`m decimated too. I hope God`s just.`
Prof: `If God isn`t just, racism wins, because you race while they, the variegated male imago within, enjoy her, which is how women have affairs. You run, and they laugh carelessly and joyously, while complaining about your errant behavior, which causes you to behave well and aspire more appropriately as you race to the fitness finishing line of life as a whipped on slave by her racist lovers. So, you have to know how to order your own affairs, as it were, before death wins the race, and you enter heaven to discover that your soulmate`s lovers have devoured it on your behalf – and her and her daughters too, because that`s what the virus is for.`
Scene XXV
Old innocuous footage, from a sex angle, of a reputedly 16 year old Traci Lords in her debut `child pornography` film, What Gets Me Hot, is followed by scenes from All Quiet On The Western Front in which soldiers march stoically towards machine guns and are mown like grass. A romantic scene from Chariots Of Fire (1981) as stiff upper lipped English gentlemen cross the finishing line at the Olympics, `with their whole lives ahead of them`, is followed by stiff legged Englishmen marching downhill to Port Stanley during the Falklands War of 1982. The sequence concludes with a passage from `When I Was One And Twenty` by A. E. Houseman and pictures of Falklands war graves.
`When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
`The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.`
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.`
Scene XXVI
MAP: `So Prof, what happens to the ‘real’ body when the ‘user’ is ‘getting his shit together’ on the inside to avoid spending his life being accused of not racing to the front of the queue to the pets` cemetery?`
Scene XXVII
There`s a clip from Michael Jackson`s promotional video for the single, Thriller (1982), in which the graves open and the zombie-like corpses dance in an offendedly stiff way.
Prof: `In your case nothing - nothing harmful, that is. You’re invisi-suit’s defenses will make sure of that. You might ‘wake up’ in unusual or unfamiliar surroundings, but your safety is guaranteed. We can give you a warranty if you wish.`
MAP: `Thanks.`
Prof: `You want one?`
Scene XXVIII
MAP strides purposefully over to the cupboard and puts on his wizard`s cloak and hat before tuning to theatrically wave the pen he`s been making notes with throughout as if it were a magician`s wand.
MAP: `I wand one!`
Prof: `The holo housing is in this area.`
The Prof gives MAP a map which looks at first sight like a large jigsaw piece, and the viewing audience is afforded a glimpse of YOU ARE HERE written on it, while an arrow indicating HOLO HOUSING shows that`s some distance from where MAP and the Prof are discussing MAP`s immediate future plans.
Prof: `You`ll already be in the RIDDLER’S holo housing, that is, your reverse imaging deep dark-light emittance retinal`s system, as soon as you begin to follow the directions on the map, MAP, but you won`t see anything much that would tell you that; until you`re there.`
MAP: `Okay, I`m there!`
Scene XXIX
MAP takes the map in his hand and, holding it up closely to the light so that he can see every nuance of the street plan, grunts his satisfaction and leaves by the door to the corridor. We see MAP walking towards lift doors and, as he admires on the wall of the inside of the lift a sepia photo of the eminent revolutionary Hungarian politician, Kossuth Lajos, with HUNGARIAN REVOLUTIONARY,
KOSSUTH written on it, track five, `Mind Your Throats Please` (15:28), of the Pink Floyd`s Atom Heart Mother (1970) is heard as the elevator descends slowly after MAP`s pressing of the button for ground level.
Scene XXX
There`s a juxtaposition of revolutionary scenes from Hungarian history, especially the Russian tank invasion of Budapest to crush the revolutionary uprising of 1956, with a nude woman in a field by the side of a cow eating grass, which needs to be assimilated into the consciousness of the cinema audience.
Act II
Scene I
MAP emerges into the foyer of the apartment block he`s residing in and, striding out into the busy thoroughfare of a major city bustling with people, he`s as careless of who they are as they are of who he is.
Scene II
MAP waves his jigsaw piece map declaratively in the faces of the people in the street he encounters as they look either shocked, or cultivate an insouciant ennui they don`t perhaps feel, in the face of such blatant intimidatory enthusiasm for life and the living of it.
MAP: `Piece in our time!`
Scene III
MAP is seen entering the holo housing still wearing his magician`s gown and cap, but the transition from walking along the thoroughfare and into the holo housing is a significant length of time equivalent to that of a pedestrian going from one block to another in New York city. Entering the holo isn`t much different from walking from one block to another, although MAP and the viewer are shown that they anticipate something instantaneous.
Scene IV
The teleporter in the US science fiction TV series Star Trek (1965-). We see a clip from Captain James T. Kirk and his away team from the Starship Enterprise beaming down from the teleporter room to a planet.
Scene V
MAP is breathing heavily on his last half a block journey to what the viewer anticipates will be the holo housing for MAP`s RIDDLER`S system after seeing the scene from Star Trek depositing an away team on a planet by means of transporter beam from the Starship Enterprise.
Scene VI
MAP passes into Rebus Emese utca, which for foreign onlookers is described as `formerly Bajcsy Zsilinsky street` on the plaque above street level indicating the locale, `not far from `Heroes` Square`, and an arrow pointing to the right, which indicator MAP`s eyes follow until the impressive monument to Hungary`s tribes looms large in the imagination of the audience as it appears magnified in MAP`s RIDDLER`S system, while his vision lingers scrutinizingly and roams appraisingly over the iron visages of the nation`s great leaders and their horses.
Scene VII
We hear MAP subvocally instructing his cyborg compsole to activate his RIDDLER’S as he walks into the foyer of the SONYPAN building. His subvocalization is something like the sound made by Peter Frampton`s Heil Talk Box on the soundtrack of the album Frampton Comes Alive (1976) and the noise someone makes when they`re speaking after a tracheotomy with a plastic pipe in their throat because they can`t use their trachea.
MAP: `The Shinto shrine in the centre of the reception area seems traditional enough; dwarf elements of an arboretum, a few pet rocks, that is, rocks chosen for their porosity and osmotic attributes making them suitable vessels for microscopic denizens of the insectoid and multi-coloured moss-developing spore varieties. The closed ecosystem has a tiny mountain in its centre, organically created in the way of stalactites and stalagmites, its twin hangs suspended from the rotunda a couple of hundred feet above, leaving me only able to gape in wonder at how the usual centuries have been bypassed in the creation of this symbiotic biosphere. Somehow the ingredients have been made to produce an atmosphere and`, MAP’s lips curve in delighted surprise, `not only tiny white clouds floating a foot or so above the stalacmite, which might, though it obviously never will, reach its stalactite twin, clinging tight to the domed roof high above, but also rivulets, waterfalls, streams and a serpentine river flowing into the artificially situated, but with total integrity in terms of its growth processes, surrounding and protectively moat-like ‘sea’.`
Scene VIII
MAP scrutinizes the edifice more closely. The audience through his eyes perceives that the mountain, a minute version of Fuji, Japan, is hollowed out and guarded, as it were, by a pair of futuristic Samurai, complete with outlandish headgear and everyday weapons in sympathy with their ancient preceptors. MAP can`t quite penetrate the murky interior of the diminutive mountain with his normal sight, but the infra-red nightsight of his invisisuit informs him that the inside of the mini-Fuji contains some kind of sophisticated machinery, presumably of the sort capable of transforming the energizing devotions of the shrine’s devotees, according to the aims of its programmers.
Scene IX
A sudden shower of rain, obviously not from the fluffy cottonesque shapes floating serenely in the Matisse on the wall behind Mt Stalacmite, causes MAP to blink and look up, before looking down at the only other possible source of liquid refreshment and a small fountain on what at first sight seems a small island floating in the midst of the circular ‘sea’. A second such outpouring and downpouring finds him revising his opinion and his estimation of this tiny worldlet for, periodically surfacing and disappearing back into the ‘depths’ are, he`s perceived to be visibly forcing himself to subvocalize before filing the information.
MAP: `Proven data.`
Miniature whales, tiny versions of their humungous counterparts in the vaster oceans of macroscopic Earth.
MAP: `What,` he murmurs aloud, `would Jonah make of this?`
Scene X
Greenius: `Or Gulliver.`
A voice to his left and one metre down chuckles. The source of the interjection is a small green creature complete with teevee-like antennae in the top of his/her/its head familiar to MAP from his boyhood experiences with scifi magazines.
Scene XI
An unseen hand places the science fiction magazines upon a coffee table and the audience is able to see the Greenius and his/her/its flying saucer on the fictionalized covers of Amazing, Astounding, and Astonishing. First we see copies of Amazing, Astounding, and Astonishing to give the audience a flavor of the weird. After that we see the covers of fictionalized versions of those popular genuine newsstand publications with the ever-increasing awareness of the viewer that the genre is being spoofed by such titles as as Astoundingly Amazing, Amazingly Astounding, Astoundingly Astounding, Amazingly Amazing, Astonishingly Astounding, Amazingly Astounding, Astoundingly Astonishing, Astonishingly Amazing. The Greenius and his/her/its flying saucer appears on the cover of all of these spoof magazines until finally we see the Greenius on the front cover of Frisbee nude with the flying saucer posing as a frisbee.
Scene XII
MAP: `Apparently you`re a Vegan. Nobody but a chlorophyll addict could be as green as you and not be an ingénue. Where’s your flying saucer for kidnapping humans for the meat locker, greenie?`
Greenius: `It’s more of a sauce-boat in shape and, I suppose, a magic lamp in function, a vessel of which I am, as it were, the informing principle or genius.`
MAP: `The genius of the sauce-boat. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.`
Greenius: `Rings are different things altogether; ask any hobbit in passing, or any passing hobbit.`
MAP: `Passing the hobbit, I know that one. A bit like pass the salt. Or ask the hobbit at Passover; after it`s touched down. Or, perhaps, after it`s passed away. I asked Tom Bombadil once.`
Greenius: `Oh, you’ve had T.B?`
MAP: `And his ‘lady fair’ who, as it happens, turned out to be more virulent than T.B. In the sense that, thanks to the hospitality of ‘Old Tomb’, she succeeded in passing on the AIDS virus to Yours Truly.`
Greenius: `Hardly a catastrophe nowadays; if you have the wherewithal to pay.`
MAP: `Yes, but the cure, though pleasant, is time-consuming, and I had business elsewhere. Sidhe whores are rich because of the curative properties of their sexual juices. Descendants of the red-haired Phoenician immortals, who`re elves to Bombadil and his ilk, their much valued labours don’t come cheap.`
[`Sidhe` is Irish for the Tuath De Danaan, who are the legendary people of Ireland, and is pronounced `she`]
Greenius: `Women of the Sidhe, Ireland`s legendary people, the Tuath De Danaan. So, very expensive then?`
MAP: `Space Marine Command foot the bill in my case, but ‘fairie for king` isn’t now presented as a high priority task in mission briefings for in-the-field operatives - me, for instance.`
Scene XIII
INRI is the sign above the figure of Jesus during his `Passion` on the cross, and a small figure on the end of a fork fulminates at an ogrish creature who`s about to bite and chew.
Fairy: `I`m a fairy king!`
The ogre takes a bite out of him and chews thoughtfully.
Ogre: `For king fairy. King of the chews.`
Scene XIV
Greenius: `And T.B.?`
MAP: `Last I heard, Old Tomb, had become a coprophile.`
Greenius: `Dirty business.`
The Greenius sniffs.
MAP: `Smells bad.`
Greenius: `Leaves a nasty taste in the mouth for all concerned.`
MAP: `Very difficult to swallow. Where’s your sauce-boat by the way?`
Greenius: `In yon grotto. The Blackpool illuminations effect behind the SAM-U-RAY units is due to its signal beacon flashing on-and-off. It came on automatically when I answered a distress call from what seemed to be a Rigelian spacelord-in-agony and materialized inside a toy Japanese mountain surrounded by microscopic whales and business-suited orientals wielding pocket-sized telecommunications systems and jabbering about ‘futures’ and ‘the future’ while making obeisances to Fuji and the illuminated sauce boat contained within.`
Scene XV
The viewer sees the signal beacon flashing on-and-off as the Greenius describes it.
Scene XVI
Out in space at a point in time unknown we see the Greenius` saucer swooping to a planet, near the star Rigel, to where a man lies agonized amidst the detritus of a battle of no significance.
Scene XVII
The saucer materializes inside a toy Japanese mountain surrounded by microscopic whales and business-suited orientals wielding pocket-sized telecommunications systems and jabbering about ‘futures’ and ‘the future’ while making obeisances to Fuji and the illuminated sauce boat contained within.
Scene XVIII
MAP: `Looks more like a magic lamp from here.`
MAP screws up his eyes, and from within MAP`s brain we see his `third eye` become `illuminati` as he focuses on the innards of the structure.
MAP: `Complete with handle, lid and spout.`
Scene XIX
MAP maintains his form as his surroundings melt away in a haze of irrelevancy as we see his ESP capability discovering, within this Aladdin’s cave, a UFO of curious provenance.
Scene XX
The small green alien doughtily affirms.
Greenius: `I. can explain everything satisfactorily from the point of view of aerodynamics, propulsion systems and the design needs of highly developed technologies.`
MAP: `Can’t you do something about that million candle power strobe effect, it’s getting on my wick?`
MAP`s eyes bulged in concentration and pain.
Greenius: `Sorry, I don`t want whatever lights your candle baby, to turn into whatever snuffs your lights out. But my Roaming candle will keep on `til I can convince the Rigelian spacelord that his agony is over. I’m a doctor, you see, and I gave him my hypocritical oath to leave the ship`s light on as a bedside lamp so he isn`t worried by the dark.`
The Greenius poses Shakespeareanly and glows with a yellow sheen.
`Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright. Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, rage, rage against the dying of the light.`
The Greenius` pose relaxes and he`s normally green again.
Greenius: `He can still see its effulgence as far out as Rigel XII.`
MAP: `Ah.`
He pauses for dramatic effect.
MAP: `Um.`
Greenius: `Not just a ‘genie of the lamp’, but an ’angel with a lamp’, a Florence Nightingale to boot.`
MAP feigns a kick at the Greenius to urge the audience to depise little green men and facilitate race hatred between the smaller green skinned people and the tall white men with beards.
MAP: `I`m just feigning a kick at you to urge an invited cinema audience to despise little green men and facilitate race war between the smaller green skinned people and the tall white men with beards, because that`s what you`re here to promote in Hollywood`s next blockbuster extravaganza in which planets collide and starships explode as a way of introducing the human species to what blondie has planned for it.`
Greenius: `Atomic.`
MAP: `By Frank and Stein.`
Scene XXI
A track plays in the background, the group Blondie singing `Atomic`, from the album Eat To The Beat (1979). The audience sees what seem like added scenes to the video from the single, `Starlight` from The Player (2001), by the band, Supermen Lovers in which planets collide as wet potatoes painted garishly and with Xmas cake plastic fir trees stuck into them, while starships clearly made out of plastic squeezy bottles and empty egg cartons, etc., implode for no discernible reason, or are surreptitiously crushed by semi invisible hands.
Scene XXII
We see a clip from US television`s Star Trek (1965-) episode, `Who Mourns For Adonais?`, in which the Enterprise starship is held fast by a giant hand in space above a planet amongst the stars.
Scene XXIII
The previous scene fades to show MAP and the Greenius as the camera left them.
MAP: `Well, Florescent? How`s the patient?`
Greenius: `Recovering nicely, or Else, the nurse, has instructions to be nasty.
Scene XXIV
Greenius: `My first name ain't baby, it's Janet - Miss Greenius if you're nasty.`
MAP: `I felt sure the sauce-boat was responding to a genuine signal from ...`
There`s a pause while MAP prepares a more genuine science fiction accent we see as being familiar from earlier TV series, Wayne`s World and Bill And Ted`s Excellent Adventure (1989).
MAP: `... right here on Earth!`
Scene XXIII
An old and decrepit Keanu Reeves wearing a boy`s clothes with baseball cap and sneakers with a T-Shirt emblazoned with the legend, CANOE REID`S and the logo of the Fantastic Four underneath (4).
Keanu Reeves: `Excellent dude!`
Scene XXIV
A cartoon in which Reid Richards of the Fantastic Four is seen paddling his own canoe with his Mr Fantastic hands along a dangerous waterway avoiding rocks until he reaches a precipice and the canoe slides down the waterfall while Reid transforms his hands into an umbrella parachute and a hang glider`s arrow to guide him safely to the bank of the river while the 4 symbol appears in the sky white on blue.
Scene XXV
MAP frowns seriously at the camera. Beneath the screen a series of sentences appear; as if scrolling underneath a news reader who is reporting on the latest reports: The audience, bewildered by the dramatic and comic elements, yet strangely attracted to them in a way that surrealism is wont to do, is restored to something of a normal vision for a television set in the cinema, and it`s meant to be a feature of the movie that the viewer increasingly feels as if someone else is being televised, that is, the audience`s thoughts about the world and reality aren`t exposed on the theatre screen in a way that`s both stimulating and encouraging for the individual who wants to understand and conceive a vision of their own. They`re fascinatedly subject to the thoughts and ideas projected there by the writer, director and actors, who`re giving them a glimpse of the possible.
Scene XXVI
MAP stops frowning at the camera and turns to the Greenius.
MAP: `The reason for the distressed signal emanating from the sauce boat has probably something to do with the Sonypan organic transmitter built to enhance its acoustic sounds by the designers of the Shinto temple`s musical effect system, but is now activated by the Japanese`s incessant and intense preoccupations with money-making through a technology that, positively idolatrous, is literally crying out for a pastoral idyll on Mt Fuji instead and the sauce boat is till registering its take.`
Scene XXVII
A supermarket checkout with the till registering its take while a woman of infinite desirability operates it.
Scene XXVIII
A man still unattractive, registering its stake, with a woman dressed in luridly erotic gear, standing over his dullness driving a piece of wood into his heart with a hammer. The audience sees scrolling beneath the legend, His Dullness, as if the tv news report we saw earlier is continuing.
Greenius: `Or the spacelord is still in agony over the stake he might have in his own future?`
MAP: `Can I see your sauce-boat?`
Greenius: `If you can get past the SAM-U-RAY. I can show you pictures of my sauce here tho`.`
Scene XXIX
The Greenius produces, ex nihilo, a series of pictures of itself on the beach wearing different colored bikinis in different locales with the Eiffel tower a prominent feature even in Africa, Israel, the Arctic, Japan and Australia. Then the Greenius produces further pictures of itself on the same beaches topless, and then nude, with no discernible difference in terms of the erotic content, which is zero from a human perspective; because these pictures of the Greenius are gender undiscernible. Although the previous pics in Playboy would give granny`s rocking chair an erection; if not granny`s skeleton sitting in it.
Scene XXX
Granny`s rocking chair with granny sitting in it looking at pictures of the Greenius in Playboy. The camera zooms in on the rocking chair on the porch of the frame house where she`s apparently living in the Deep South of the United States of America, probably Miami, Florida, because of the miasmic Everglades` atmosphere, until the cover of the Greenius issue visibly displaying the Greenius with her best bits covered tastefully while it, he, or she eats a veggie burger to match her skin. Granny rocks rhythmically, like Sylvia Kristel in the Emmanuelle (1974) film, and the camera zooms behind her like a swamp fly so that we can see her flipping the pages as the rocking chair rocks faster and the scene fades out.
Scene XXXI
MAP: `How did you get past the SAM-U-RAY Greenius?`
Greenius: `Nobody seems concerned about me too much. It’s the sauce-boat that fascinates them. I. wander round with impunity here. I drink coffee and eat doughnuts in the boardroom while they discuss technological possibilities and financial remuneration with regard to the research potential of the object inside their scale model of Mt Fuji, play three-some squash with them inside their sports centres, indulge in troilism while they’re having sex with their wives or secretaries on the desks in their offices... No one seems to mind.`
MAP: `Let’s see the pictures.`
Scene XXXII
We see the Greenius in time delay sequences, disappearing and reappearing in the scene, while the people gawk at the sauce boat; as they gather around. The Greenius comes and goes; sometimes in the foreground and sometimes further away, but close to the sauce boat, or entering and leaving the spacecraft. The Greenius is seen with a deckchair, a flower in a pot, carrying equipment for cleaning bathrooms and kitchens, and wearing several different hats that are being tried for effect, as it were, as the bystanders goggle unmoved at the sauce boat; without seeming to observe the occupant at all. Finally, the Greenius is seen carrying onions and wearing a French beret and sporting a moustache pretending to be concerned at being recognized by the crowd, who are obviously highly trained Hollywood actors because they don`t see the green alien as being in any way remarkable.
Greenius: `This is my wife,` said the alien with the teevee antennae sticking out of the top of its pointed green head, `and my mother-in-law,` indicating a fortyish and fetishistically fat pair of naked green aliens with four breasts each, `isn’t she adorable?`
MAP ejaculates convulsively.
MAP: `Ugh!`
MAP recovers himself just in time to note a momently passing shadow of some obscure emotion - homesickness? - passing fleetingly across the mien of his short green friend.
MAP: `Wow! I mean, won’t you show me piccies of the sauce-boat, please?`
Greenius: `Oh, that!`
The dwarfish saucerer grunts huffily and holds up another series of seemingly flat, but deep and expansive to the eye of the beholder, tri-D holos.
Scene XXXII
The audience sees a cinema audience similar to their own reach into a bag provided by the management of the theatre and take out 3-D specs which they all put on in unison so that they can see the tri-Ds, which are black and featureless to the viewers in the theatre until the filmed audience put on their 3-D specs.
MAP: `I. see.`
MAP scrutinizes a very large sauce-boat with his diminutive green buddy standing alongside. Flipping the hol over to look at the other side of the peculiar contraption, he barely suppresses a laugh as, to his amusement, he sees S.O.S lettered on the UFO`s other side:
MAP: `It’s an S.O.S minimediship.`
Greenius: `That’s what it is. I said so, it`s a sos boat. S.O.S., sauce.`
MAP reflects.
MAP: `I’ll have to reflect on this, wait here.`
Act III
Scene I
MAP`s order is accompanied by his walking through a door marked GENTS that suddenly appears in a wall ex nihilo. He turns left through an archway that wasn’t in the building plans, enters a softly lit room with soft insistently relaxing music gently straining the air around him, and sits down in a hardly upholstered leatherplas sofa before a tri-D monitor screen showing soft-focus aerial scenes of the verdant green and dun swathes of the sandy Martian plains just a few million kilometres -`
MAP: `Thataway!`
Scene II
MAP points a forefinger dramatically in an arbitrary direction, and slumps into a ruminative posture. His mind awakens to the sight of Larry King clone #15 interviewing a Sting clone #8 discussing the possible reforming of the band, The Police, and the Sting clone is trying to explain the complicated procedures involved in deciding whether or not to use Andy Summers` clone #12 or #7.
Sting clone #8: `Apparently the Stewart Copeland clones #17 and #27 preferred Summers` clone #12, while Copeland clone #32 preferred Summers clone #7. The decision was made slightly easier by the fact that Copeland #32 has lost one of his driving arms in a motorcycle accident, and the cybernetic prosthetic had difficulties with ‘Walking on the Moon’ and ‘The Jumping Jews of Jupiter’ because of the syncopation. So, Sting decided it was a toss up between Copeland clones #17 and #27. Sting tended to favour the elder clone because it demonstrates a ‘bit of class’ using original 80s hair gel and one of the real Summers’ ancient guitars.`
Sting clone #8 sighs heavily as if despairingly.
Sting clone #8: `Copeland clones were also prone to suiciding for no discernible cause, which suggests that #17 had, so to speak, a certain amount of ‘staying power’. In the final analysis, it didn’t much matter because Sting #8, not the clone, in typical rock star style, decided to form a new supergroup featuring the new Hendrix, Bonham and Garcia holograms. The name of the band was still under discussion, but so far The Grateful Electric Dead Dick Ladyland Experience is favourite.`
Scene III
MAP yawns, sits up, consults the chronometer at the top right hand corner of the tri-D, gets to his feet, and makes his way back to where the GENTS door is.
Act IV
Scene I
MAP is seen outside closing the door with the GENTS sign to where his short green friend is still writing by the side of the moat where he seems to be struggling with something and MAP, sensing danger, rapidly closes the distance between them.
Greenius `Hi!` said the saucerer. `I think I’ve got one.`
MAP: `One what?`
Greenius: `A squirter.`
MAP: `Uh?`
MAP stands bemused while a shower of tiny droplets fall about his neck and shoulders.
MAP: `Uh-hum.`
Scene II
The camera zooms over to where the presumably very expensive miniature whales can be seen in the tiny sea where the Shinto microcosm is attracting more people who`d been passing by and are entranced by the small fountains of water emerging from their blow holes.
Scene III
With a quick jerk on the length of superstring it`s using, the saucerer pulls a mini-leviathan from the depths and deposits it thrashing wildly around on the parquetry.
MAP: `Now what?`
Greenius: `I want to compare my blow hole with its.`
The green-about-the-gills Ahab spins theatrically before becoming visible again in a sou`wester and holding a ship`s wheel.
MAP: `It’s white, Cap`n Ahab. Moby Dick?`
Greenius: `Dick?`
MAP: `Dick.`
Scene IV
The Greenius` karaoke drum solo, behind a fluorescent drum kit with the trademark brass gong, to the audio intro to Led Zeppelin`s `Moby Dick` on the soundtrack of the film, The Song Remains The Same (1976), in which the introduction to John Bonham`s drum solo echoes, `Moby Dick ... Dick ... Dick ... Dick ...`
MAP echoes automatically.
MAP: `Dick.`
Scene V
The Greenius appears as if bubbling up from some subterranean wellspring in a yellow submarine to the sound of Echoes (1971) by The Pink Floyd. He`s wearing opaque pink sunglasses and wears an `All You Need Is Love` T-shirt. He removes his sunglasses and looks direct to camera so that the audience know that he`s addressing them personally as if he were Oprah Winfrey.
Greenius: `It`s as if I`m Oprah Winfrey, isn`t it?
The Greenius produces a mauve kerchief and mops his brow in a truly thespian gesture to please the crowd.
Greenius: `My sense of reality is beginning to seem tenuous even by my high standards.`
MAP: `Your interference with Leviathan has disturbed the guardians.`
Scene VI
MAP indicates the previously stalwartly static samurai now whirling their lightswords in unison and, eyes blazing with blue fire, ritualistically flexing their plasteel armored knee-joints.
MAP: `It seems they`re in preparation for a ‘Great Leap Forward’ across the moat separating them from the infidel despoilers.`
Greenius: `Fishing poacher.`
MAP: `Quick. To the Gents.`
Greenius: `Shouldn’t that be, `To the Batmobile!’?`
MAP: `Is your name Robin?`
Greenius: `No, Batman it’s Smee. I was last seen in Hook.`
MAP: `So you were fishing for the croc?`
Greenius: `Of gold?`
MAP: `No, the crocodile that ate Captain Hook`s hand in Peter Pan, the movie in which Julia Roberts starred as the fairy Tinkerbell, and the Lost Boys who were happier when they didn`t want to go home.`
MAP assumes the air of a noble psychiatrist and puts pince nez on his nose.
MAP: `So, the whales are the Lost Boys?`
Greenius: `No, but these are the whales that swallowed the Lost Boys to stop them getting bigger, which is what Leviathan do.`
MAP: `So that`s why Cap`n Ahab harpooned the white whale, Moby Dick, in the movie version of Herman Melville`s novel?`
Greenius: It`s biblical. Ahab was the king that stole his subject`s garden, because his subject was too big. Harmless, but too big. For the king to feel bigger. Ahab killed the whale because it was too big. For Ahab to feel big, which is why these whales ate the Lost Boys. That`s what bigger fish do.`
MAP: So the crocodile that ate Cap`n Hook`s hand in Peter Pan was what big people do?`
Greenius: `Yes, but it`s a fish.`
MAP: `In the Bible Leviathan is Satan.`
Greenius: `Because big fish eat smaller ones.`
MAP: `But Ahab is a man.`
Greenius: `Oh? Then why did he steal Naboth`s vineyard?`
MAP: `More big -`
Greenius: `- dick.`
MAP: `Ahab killed Naboth, because it turned him on, dude.`
Greenius: `Men call me Smee, but we`re not you.`
The alien stuck two fingers under MAP’s nose making a `U` sign.
MAP, from out of the corner of his eye detecting the shapes of the Sam-u-ray leaping across the watery barrier, seized his unruly comrade by the shoulder and thrust him head first into the cubicle.
Scene VI
MAP, locking the GENTS door, makes a left turn into a wall, where suddenly there is none and returns to his former position in front of the tri-D where Larry #15 is interviewing the three Stewart Copeland clones.
Larry #15: `So, you were outlining your plans for a rather unlikely ‘supergroup’ featuring all of the surviving Copeland clones. The main feature of their performing together is to be the suicide of one or more of their number during the hit-record, ‘Message in a Bottle’? Isn`t that so?`
Stewart Copeland clone #17: `Although the exact timing is rather uncertain, the pills they took from the ‘bottle’ at the beginning of the gig don’t work at the same rate with different metabolisms, so it`s possible for one clone to ‘suicide’ during ‘De do de do, De da da da (that’s all I want to say, while I`m still sentient’, while another will pop-his-clogs to the strains of ‘Soul Only’. Still, it`ll be more fun for the audience who can make bets on which of the drummers will keel over first and when. Fortunes can be won and lost in this fashion. One girl became a multimillionaire five times over during one memorable evening at the Hackney Empire in London when, thanks to ‘insider’ information, she predicted both drummer, song and ‘trajectory of collapse’, but that’s another story...`
Scene VII
MAP, retracing his steps back to where the GENTS seemed to have disappeared and, putting his arm through a no-wall, felt around for a second or two, before gripping onto a piece of, probably, soft green flesh, and hauled.
MAP: `Yowwchh!`
Scene VIII
The saucerer squeals, appearing inside RIDDLER’S tesseractile innards clutching a crumpled cauliflower-like ear and kicking out wildly at its unknown assailant.
Greenius: `Oh, it’s you!`
The Greenius becomes more tranquilised at the sight of carpets, sofa, armchairs, firelight and tri-D.
MAP: `Make yourself comfortable, greenie, and don’t vomit on the fixtures and fittings. I want the place to be habitable when I get back.`
Greenius: `From where?`
MAP: `I have to do a spot of midnight stalking at a Gothic chapel in Sector 8, amid reports of ‘dark forces’, ‘evil manifestations’, sundry other dodginesses, and a plethora of unspecified ne’er do wells clearly requiring an investigator.`
Greenius: `Oh, how twee. You’re a plod, a bobby, a copper, a rozzer ...`
MAP: `Yes, and as Holmes needs her cruise, so Sherlock must have his Watson. Want to come?`
Greenius: `Okay.`
Act V
Scene I
The Chapel, as the incongruously tall, blonde and dwarfishly green pair pass through one of the tri-D lounge’s permeable walls into the updated religious artefacts environs, is lit up inside with an unholy light of sickly yellow ochre, amidst which there appear strange gesticulations and gyrations from figures unseen but that are manically - if not maniacally - active. Growing closer our two disparate heroes find themselves drawn to a small oval casement window situated below ground level in what, upon closer examination, appears to be some kind of catacomb or other species of burial chamber. Arrayed along both sides of the tomb - if such it was - are caskets; lead, brass, glass in a few cases, and some of bronze, silver gold and, at the far end of the crypt, MAP thinks he can detect a red ruby glow which, he assumes, not very originally, is caused by rubies. MAP`s green goblin pal, bored with the static aspects of the spectacle, opts to kick a gaping hole in the archaeological relic’s glass portal and, without waiting for MAP to register either amazement or chagrin, swings feet first through the opening and into the gaping mouth of a velvet lined teak coffin with brass fittings, the lid promptly falling on top of him.
Scene II
The narrator`s voice is heard describing an alternative turn to the tale.
Narrator: `It might have been the end of the story if MAP, following his first inclination, had simply gaped and disappeared, leaving the recklessly determined goblin to its determined fate. Still, MAP was curious and, well, the green saucerer was sort of endearing in an alien kind of way.`
Scene III
Ignoring the Greenius` muffled cries and groans, MAP leaves the below stairs atmosphere and goes to have a peek at the denizens of what he imagines is probably some kind of drugs` orgy taking place amidst the relative aweful security surrounding a structure of worship with its aura of numinousity and intangible nole me tangere atmosphere. Not one to stand on ceremony, MAP takes the flight of steps leading to the entrance archway three at a time, pausing only to look up to check that the carved oaken portals are swung wide open in invitation and, disappointed, strode briskly into the vestibule where, in spite of his being trained always to 'expect the unexpected', even MAP is taken aback by the strangeness of the guardian set before the gathered congregation.
Scene IV
At first he thinks himself confronted by an effigy of the Hindu goddess Kali, but that image, his `illuminated` brain reminds him harshly, properly belongs to a later sequence in Robika Square, Budapest, which the audience hasn`t yet seen, and which is put before them enigmatically with the date twenty-two eleven twenty-three seventeen (22. 11. 2317) clearly visible in the top right corner of the screen; as if it`s a recording of something yet to happen, because the clock and calendar above the square reads quite distinctly, 03. 03. 2312.
MAP: `May the god Robika watch over and protect me from such spectral influences.`
Scene V
The apparition has six arms (and two legs) or eight legs (or eight arms) depending on your point of view. MAP begins to talk his way through the scene and it seems curious that he`s speaking to no one until we see how cautiously he moves.
MAP: `Man-high spiders are an unusual sight at the best of times, I know, but to find one so far from its home in the Arachnian star system is, to say the least, odd. No matter, moving three of its furry legs in concord, its multi-faceted eyes twinkling incuriously but watchfully while, all the while, a peculiar thrum-thrum-thrumming sound is emitted from some mysteriously unsleeping awareness within its hideous frame. I, unwilling to spare even a few moments to converse politely with the ugly creature (if such be possible) move readily past its monstrous form and into the sepulchral glow pulsing at the heart of the inner sanctum of the chapel.`
Scene VI
MAP arrives at the inner sanctum of the chapel with a huge elated sigh of withheld fear. The pulsating metaphor was apt. Apart from the grotesquerie in the shape of the forms casting fitful shapes against the opacities at the far limits of the outer gloom, in a clearing at the centre of the thronged worshippers, was a fitfully pulsing heart of vast proportions, now throbbing weakly, its pulse sporadic and faint, yet still dominating its devilish devotees by virtue of the liquid pulsing sporadically from the multitude of home-made tubes, pipes, taps and siphons plunged haphazardly into every available centimetre of its formerly rose-hued but now pinkly pale-blue pericardeum, a pin-cushion-like effect which the gathering had created to feed their unquencheable need for that liquid which was the stuff of their vampiric lust.
Scene VII
The audience hear MAP`s thoughts as if he`s caught unawares by an eavesdropper as he comments on the unfolding scene.
MAP: `A scene of great irony in some ways.`
Scene VIII
The great heart, speared repeatedly by a multitude staking claim to their Satanic futures. Placing a stake in the way of the traditional hunter of the 'undead', thrusting a pointed wooden shaft deep into the heart of his/her victim. Cups, goblets, glasses and bowls littered the hall. Guests and, judging by the howls and gurgles emerging periodically from the darker recesses of the cavernous chamber, revellers littering nooks, crannys, niches, pews and, the less particular or indifferent, those harsh stone flaggings and island tombstones that constituted the walkways and clearways of the Chapel's original tenants.
Scene IX
MAP, perceiving that the weakness of the energy source for the bizarre festival is nearing the zenith of its enfeeblement, recalls his alien 'contact' with an irritated sense of awoken responsibility.
'By the bloated balls of Beelzebub.'
MAP swears an oath as the light from the dying source of life-renewing ichor grows dim.
MAP: 'Where is that son-of-a-sauceboat?'
Scene X
The audience see MAP retracing his steps back through the vestibule, stopping only to briefly acknowledge the - in other circumstances - laughably ridiculous attempts of the spiderman to offer access to the cloakless cloakrooms in return for non-existent numbered ticket-stubs, MAP takes the steps four at a time in his headlong haste to reach the sarcophagous-imprisoned space-elf in the basement.
Scene XI
In the 'steps' of his fairy friend, swinging feet-first through the wrecked casement window, MAP lands with a sickening crash on the lid of the coffin inside which the green gremlin lies encased and endangered due to that well-documented and proven convention between a short supply of air and suffocation.
MAP: 'Sorry little buddy. I'll have you out of there faster than it takes a sugar daddy vampire with a sweet tooth fairy; just as soon as I can get my tootsies liberated from the splintered remnants of this outsize shoe-box.'
So saying, MAP, ankles and calves dully complaining about the splinters of teak hardwood embedded in their sinews, gingerly-yet-forcefully, extricates his feet from death's broken-yet-unyielding mould. Lowering himself from casket to the colder clamminess of the crypt's floorspace, MAP proceeds to prize open the coffin and, fearful now, lest his erstwhile ally gasps his last in the interim between, as it were, one heart-beat and another, clasps the proferred arm within, slinging its deceptively heavy occupant onto his back before making for the steps leading upward and outward from the place of entombment.
Voice: 'Have we been introduced?'
The voice asks close to MAP`s ear.
Voice: 'I don't recall meeting you at the prosectorum?'
MAP: 'The what?'
MAP is somewhat disarmed by the gentleness of the enquiry.
Voice: 'It's an anatomist's term, loosely rendered it means 'theatre of operations'. I'm referring to the blood-letting, the draining of the Sacred Heart for the sake of its immortality-conferriing life-force, the 'blood-sucking leeches', the undead and undying, you know.'
MAP: 'Yes, of course.'
MAP politely drops the should-be corpse onto the floor and, stomping on its head, until voice and body cease bleating and sporadically thrashing respectively.
Greenius: 'I wondered how long it would take you to get here.'
The Greenius` more familiar voice somewhere above MAP`s head.
Greenius: 'It feels like I've been hanging around here for an eternity already.'
MAP: 'You might have been.'
MAP informs the disembodied wraith floating in a greenish hazy nimbus somewhere above his now befuddled head.
MAP: 'And you might still be, if we don't get out of here pronto before the black brethren decide its time to retire for the evening.'
Greenius: 'No problem for me.'
The will o` the wisp floats demonstrably.
Greenius: `I was just hanging around waiting for you -'
The Greenius continues in an offended tone.
Greenius: ' - so I could say goodbye with a clear conscience.'
So saying, the genie of the sauceboat oozes gaseously through the shards of glass still ringing the rim of the casement window's frame, to resolidify and proffer a spindly yet surprisingly powerful green hand for MAP to clench and be pulled with yet more surprising ease into the freezing night air.
Scene XII
MAP: 'Cold, no?'
MAP's question is more a statement of fact.
Greenius: 'Very.'
The imp agrees.
'Then I think a small conflagration is in order.'
MAP`s announcement is accompanied by his pulling at incendiary grenades arrayed in neat pouches hung around his waist, and wrapped crosswise about chest and back beneath his shirt.
Act VI
Scene I
Warming themselves before the blazing ruins of the Chapel, the screaming and oaths having ended a few hours ago, the saucerer began to relate something of his side of the night's recent events.
Greenius: 'The one playing doggo was a vicious bastard. You were quite right to stomp him. I was getting ready to let him have it when you gave it to him yourself in fact.'
MAP agrees.
MAP: 'Of course you were.`
Greenius: 'He'd just ravaged a very pretty young vampirella with long blonde hair and sweet white skin. Must've been toothsome because he wasted notime in sinking his over-developed canines into her bosom. Horrific, but strangely erotic. Afterwards, he placed her in almost loving fashion inside one of the three Iron Maiden contraptions, you know, like the Egyptian mummies' sarcophagi but with spikes all over the inside of the box and lid, justto be sure, you know. A distasteful memory, but thanks all the same.'
Scene II
The scene is played out just as the Greenius describes it for the edification and entertainment of the viewer.
Scene III
MAP: 'Fangs for the mammaries?'
Greenius: 'Those too.'
MAP: 'Which two?'
Greenius: 'Two? Witch?'
MAP: 'What are you, a dyslexic parrot, or an owl?'
Greenius: 'It's a hoot, isn't it?'
MAP: 'I could think of funnier 'owlers.'
The Greenius strikes a thespian pose and declaims.
Geenius: `I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.`
'That`s Allen Ginsberg`s Howl, not owl. Do you want to drive the director crazy?`
MAP feigns genuine offendedness; for the sake of breaking the convention that the actors and the audience are separated from the perception it`s a movie. The broken convention affords the viewer a possibility of what virtual reality could be if screen actors could interact with the audience. It also keeps the audience alert in case the actors address them personally, which is a delightful, or terrifying prospect, depending on the individual cinema goer. The notion that the film keeps the movie theater in fear, lest the actor speak to them personally, wouldn`t be new in a virtual reality theatre, but the possibility adds spice to the picture.
MAP: Come on. We have a date with destiny in Robika Square.'
Act VII
Scene I
MAP speaks to his breathless companion, the Greenius, who`s experiencing the hard reality of keeping up with the Great Man's long, easy stride.
MAP: 'Squares are magical.'
The audience hears MAP thinking to himself.
MAP: `It`s a hard job for a short-legged ufonaut with a big head.`
The Greenius can hear MAP too and adopts a shrill stereotypical negro voice and pose to berate MAP for thinking so.
Greenius: `I c`n hear ya, Aloysius!`
MAP: `Begging your paradon, Ma`am?`
Geeenius: `Where I come from big-headedness isn`t a UFOmism for conceited. I`ll report you for slander to CAR, the Commission for Alien Rights. Where I come from 'big head' is a synonym for superintelligence, which is why our architectons chose Robika Square for the Hindu scene. Robika became a patron saint of Tantric yoga after explaining that the biblical Commandment, 'Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery', didn`t apply to him as, like Jesus, Robika was born from his mother, the Virgin Veronica.`
Scene II
Robika being born from the Virgin Veronica who is an usherette at a cinema in Milwaukee seen eating ice cream repeatedly until one afternoon during a matinee performance of The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) she gives birth alone and unaided in the back row of the auditorium while the Greenius is seen wearing a halo and flapping wings of a diaphanous purity over her as pop giants, Bon Jovi, perform the song `Living On A Prayer` from the album Slippery When Wet (1986) to keep her mind focused on the processing. At last Robika emerges to fanfares of trumpets as the Romans arrive to crucify Jesus who is seen during his `Passion` before expiring and Longinus the Roman centurion thrusts his spear deep into the side of the Messiah as if looking to see if Robika might be in there as well.
Greenius: `So Robika was pure and unadulterated, and so unable to commit adultery no matter how many affairs he was involved in. In fact, as a protestant, he felt duty bound to rebel against a restriction, which his knowledge of Eastern belief systems led him to believe was false. Tantricism, including group sex, and a multi-partnered lifestyle, was a gateway to higher consciousness and spiritual fulfilment.
Scene III
The saintly Robika engaging in Tantricism, while accompanied by Bon Jovi`s `Living On A Prayer` and the Greenius in a halo shouting in a shrill negro voice.
Greenius: `I c`n hear you Aloysius!`
Scene IV
Robika`s 'protest' he incorporated into his own behavioural pattern for which he was persecuted randomly, but systematically. Newspaper headlines, `Piss Off You` greet Robika`s latest album of himself almost naked on a wooden cross in the style of Jesus with his long hair covering his nipples and wearing a loin cloth. The video features Robika wearing an Afghan coat doing a dance he calls `trouncing` in a television interview with Lettuceman who spends a lot of the interview endeavoring to hide his rabbit`s ears, which he has for some reason unbeknownst to anyone.
Robika: `I call it `trouncing`. You wanna piss on me?`
Robika is discovered on the set of his latest video extravaganza being beaten up by himself surrounded by TV sets with clips from `Piss Off Me` featured heavily.
Scene V
Robika`s new video, `Old Tits Against Me`, is reviled by the critical glitterati and the newspapers with unorigninally titled headlines like, `TROUNCED!` and `PISS OFF YOU!` Robika appears again on Lettuceman who`s wearing a straw boater from beneath which his ears keep struggling to appear while Lettuceman endeavors to surreptitiously smooth them back into position.
Robika: `I accept it as good publicity for my work, I don`t see it as in any way persecutive.`
Lettuceman pours a bucket of ice cream over Robika and glues a paper cup over his nose with superglue while Robika struggles to make anything other than hooting sounds through his nostrils. Lettuceman drools on a carrot while the audience hoots derisively.
Scene VI
The scene with Lettuceman has been incorporated into Robika`s latest video sensation in which the paper cup appears glued to his nose making noises like a saxophone while Robika wears a dress and stands in the middle of a pool on a plinth with sharks around him.
Robika: `Wank Butch!`
At the zenith of the instrumental blockbuster of a pop miracle, Robika puts a fox`s head on. The `Willow Farm` passage from Genesis` `Supper`s Ready` on the album Foxtrot (1971) is heard weakly throughout beneath the wild bluesy paper cup saxophone solo.
Genesis:
`If you go down to Willow Farm,
to look for butterflies, flutterbyes, gutterflies
Open your eyes, it's full of surprise, everyone lies,
like the focks on the rocks,
and the musical box.
Oh, there's Mum & Dad, and good and bad,
and everyone's happy to be here.
There's Winston Churchill dressed in drag,
he used to be a British flag, plastic bag, what a drag.
The frog was a prince, the prince was a brick, the brick was an
egg,
the egg was a bird.
(Fly away you sweet little thing, they're hard on your tail)
Hadn't you heard?
(They're going to change you into a human being!)
Yes, we're happy as fish and gorgeous as geese,
and wonderfully clean in the morning.
We've got everything, we're growing everything,
We've got some in
We've got some out
We've got some wild things floating about
Everyone, we're changing everyone,
you name them all,
We've had them here,
And the real stars are still to appear.`
The video fades to a picture of Winston Churchill wearing a T-Shirt on which is written, `BRITAIN ISN`T TWERKING`.
Greenius: `Salvation came in the shape of a young woman who loved him for himself. She it was who, allowing the persecutors to fall upon her, exemplifying her love, turned the weapons of the evil doers against themselves. Though wallowing herself for a time in the trough of pigs, she emerged in radiance and truth to vindicate the man she worshipped.'
Scene VII
A young woman appears in the life of Robika, the saintly, and the couple are seen at different and various functions gazing adoringly into each others eyes and fondling. The scenes are interspersed with newspaper headlines preaching the gospel according to the gutter press, `PIGS RUN OFF A CLIFF TOGETHER!` and `PIG`S ON SOMEONE HIS OWN SIZE`.
Scene VIII
Flashbulbs pop while Robika and the mysterious woman smile happily. Lettuceman is seen popping bulbs with the rest of the paparrazi whilst his ears are seen sticking directly upwards pointedly at the stars in heaven as the loving couple get out of limousines at varying locales. Robika greets Lettuceman with a high five and gives him a five dollar note with Lettuceman`s face on it bearing the legend, Bucks` 5.
MAP: 'Who was she?'
Greenius: 'Her memorial`s in Heroes' Square. There's a bird with a rose in its beak perched on a goblet. No inscription, and no clues as to its origin. The sculptor's name is not known, but the people know for whom the tiny bronze statue was made.'
Scene IX
Heroes` square in Budapest and a mournful closeup of the bird as described while Metallica`s Unforgiven II from their eponymously and unimaginatively titled fifth album Metallica (1991) is heard as the soundtrack.
The Greenius` jaw trembles and a tiny rivulet of slime trickles from beneath a wetly flickering eyelid, so belying his usual stoic imerturbability.
MAP: 'Sounds like another sob story.'
MAP nods in agreement.
Greenius: 'Oh, he was an S.O.B alright. The sonofabitch let her go to the devil when she could've gone to the church.'
MAP: 'He sounds like some kind of monster.'
Greenius: 'No one should judge by appearances, you should know that. But, in his own way, Robika was a principled theologian, and his beauty loved her beast.'
MAP: `What kind of beast was she?`
Greenius: `He.`
The Greenius chuckles.
Greenius: `He he he.`
MAP: 'All's well that ends well?'
Greenius: 'Ask that pill Shakespeare; the bird, the rose, and the goblet will keep their silence forever.'
MAP: 'Isn't their story written down anywhere?'
Greenius: 'Legend has it that the balladeers wrote songs about them; there's a classical piece by Metal Lickers titled `That Fork You Didn`t Give Us`, which might have been composed in their honour, and of course the tragicomic operatta by Bor László, 'The Tale of Rosewine', is said to have been inspired by their ill-starred romance.
Scene X
A stage set from the Pest opera house in Budapest`s Andrassy street where we see the girl in the role of Rosewine wearing traditional Hungarian costumery walking in the forest of painted trees by the light of a paper moon in a scene from our fictional tragicomic operatta by the equally fictional Hungarian born physicist and poet, Bor László, as she sings a song from Bor`s The Tale Of Rosewine with the whimsically irrational title, `Hola! Apples and Pears`.
'Hola! Apples and Pears,
I've unzipped a Banana,
Hola! Peaches and Plums
I've had Bananarama,
Hola! Oranges and Grapes,
I've said Abracada-bra
Hola! Lemons and Limes
I've ... na nah na na nah nuh!
Hola! Melons and Port!
Forever Carmina Burana!'
Scene XI
Greenius: 'So, who do you work for? I guess you weren`t at the SONYPAN building by accident?`
MAP: 'Fun.'
Greenius: 'You work for F.U.N, the Federation of the United Nations?'
MAP: 'No, I work for P.E.N, capital P for pleasure, E for entertainment, and N nepotism. I work for myself. I`m independently wealthy although I do the occasional trick for whoever can give me something I wouldn`t ordinarily be able to have.'
Greenius: 'Well, they do say that the pen is mightier than the sword.'
MAP: 'It depends how big the pen is. I`ve heard of a few people run over by a bus, but not very many who were crushed beneath the weight of a fountain pen.`
Scene XII
Cartoon of someone being run over by a bus but miraculously uninjured she walks over to the pavement and begins to go along the sidewalk until a giant fountain pen falls on her and she`s crushed.
Scene XIII
MAP: 'Okay, two choices. You can either stay here and keep the seat of that chair warm for my return, or...'
MAP rises to his feet and walks towards an Exotic wall mural depicting the mating cycle of the Aldebaran horse tree. The flowform montage displays scenes of the Aldebaran horse tree giving birth. Nomadic tribesmen are seen engaged in some ritualistic play similar to the basketball of pre-federated Pan-America. Our green friend follows MAP`s lead - and walks through the wall.
Scene XIV
They emerged in a sandy desert with tents amidst a ritual in which a circle of young men (thirteen in number) with beards in various states of growth, cleanliness and disorder, move in a ring while chanting.
'In out, in out, shake it all about;
You do the no key, no key,
And they keep you out;
That's what it's all about!
Oh, do the no key, no key,
Oh, do the no key, no key,
Oh, do the no key, no key,
That's what it's all about! No key!'
The flavor is Pythonesque and suggestive of a scene from The Life Of Brian (1979) movie. During the chant each participant pushes a straw into a red-and-white striped container marked COKE-Y and shouts.
Beardie: 'Coke-y!'
Each then snorts some of its contents into their nostrils. After that they pop colorful pills into their mouth from tubes marked 'SMART` and `E`. After a while, the chain involuntarily collapses as one or more of the beardies falls over.
MAP: `I mentioned the woman`s penis once; but they think they got away with it.`
Greenius: I see. It isn`t a women`s sowing circle.`
MAP demands in the way of a man of practice.
MAP: 'Where are the women?'
Greenius: 'Probably in there somewhere.'
Scene XV
MAP`s green-skinned comrade points his extraterrestriedly glow-tip digit in the direction of a large bulbous stone edifice buried beneath a mass of what seems to be carved statuary depicting every kind of sexual delight recognizable, which looks a bit like the sight of snails mating on a rock in the middle of a stream during a flood: a seamless mound of unmoving greyness. Except that, as with the snails' slow-mo 'love-in', it`s a hill of statuesque flesh; in movement too. A barely perceptible shudder discernibly passes through the mass of intertwined bodies, like electrical transmissions pulsing inside a cerebrum, or the pulsing of blood vessels around a dying heart.
Scene XVI
MAP admits to the Greenius.
MAP: 'I would have expected a bit more liveliness from an orgy.'
Greenius: 'I think you'll find there's a good reason for their restrained display.'
Scene XVII
The Greenius is suddenly transformed until he`s wearing Lincoln Green in the style of Robin Hood complete with bows and arrows. He sings a line from the Mel Brooks` movie Men In Tights (1993) exhortatively and operatically.
Greenius: `We're men, we're men in tights. We roam around the forest looking for fights. We're men, we're men in tights.`
MAP in a very gay voice, just as it is in the Mel Brooks` film.
MAP: `Yes.`
Greenius: 'If you take a closer look you'll notice that the coitus in which they're engaged is more of a punishment than a pleasure.'
Scene XVIII
Stepping closer MAP is able to confirm his alien sidekick's strange hypothesis. Those embroiled in what ought to be the throes of passion are, in fact, in the throes of agonizing bliss. The males are attached to the females by ludicrously surreal devices of intricately torturous design; tiny but strong-as-steel contraptions linking body parts by means of piercings, straps and harnesses, so that it is impossible for any participant to move more than a few millimetres without causing pain to another member (no, seriously). Consequently, the entire gathering are kept in a perpetual state of arousal or almost-climax, because always lacking that forceful thrust which would send them into orgasm, and so perpetually prevented, through a mixture of enchainment and pain, from achieving that desperately sought release and relief.
Scene XIX
Close by are shapes other than those atop the fantastically decorated temple dome which aren`t recognizably human. Near the base MAP can see a female Balrog familiar from J. R. R. Tolkien`s novel, The Lord Of The Rings (1954-5), in which the wizard, Gandalf, encounters a Balrog above the abyss in the mine of Moria during the first part of the trilogy, which was made into the film, The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). After a struggle, which can be seen in the movie, the Balrog falls, but drags Gandalf down with him by curling his whip about the Wizard. The Balrog`s lion-head is speaking with an elephant-headed Ganesh.
Balrog: `Is this what they mean be being well connected?`
Ganesh: `Rather them than us.`
Balrog: `I`d rather have a cup of tea.`
The Ganesh adopts a broad Northern accent familiar to fans of `The Four Yorkshiremen` skit from Britain`s Independent Television (ITV), At Last The 1948 Show (1967).
Ganesh: `And you try telling the young people of today that. They won`t believe you!`
Scene XX
Further away are werewolves, werebears, and other werefolk; such as horny satires and nympho nymphs. These humans look askance at each other as if speculating as to what the strange apparition could signify.
Satire: `Personally, I eat and drink.`
Nymph: `I never eat food that speaks.`
Scene XXI
At the apex of the living pyramid of lust is a grotesquely beautiful being; her shaggy yellow pelt concealing whatever is unseen and unseeable beneath her thick pelt, as she bows forward illuminated and pulsing to the shuddering rhythms of its well connected adherents.
MAP: 'What in the name of God is that?'
Greenius: `They have many names, but on my home world they call them Shoggoths. Yog Shoggoth to be more precise; or, if you prefer, Iot Sokot. The Shoggoth appear at the heart of H. P. Lovecraft`s fictional maze in the book of the Necronomicon written by the Arab known as the Mad Monk, Abdul Alhazred. Women don`t like to be seen, and are hidden beneath their cloaks in Arabia; for the simple reason that there are four women in a marriage there, and two plus two makes more than five. Consequently, the Shoggoth are fabled and renowned for strangeness and beauty. Feared by some men, loved by others, very few men or women of any race have been beloved by a Shoggoth. It’s a rare and beautiful thing indeed for a human to know what it is to be the love of such a creature rather than its pet, which can (and has) been the way of such symbioses in the past.`
MAP: `That reminds me, I must buy a sim card for the phone.`
Scene XXII
MAP frowns and begins fiddling with the phone he takes from his pocket before showing the sim card to the camera so that the audience registers SIM and the fact that MAP has shown them that there`s no communicative functionality on the phone.
Scene XXIII
Greenius: `The Shoggoth, if it finds one sympathetic to it, enters into a parasitical union in which the host is simply a vessel, an instrument through which its will is manifest. But, occasionally the Shoggoth’s relationship becomes one of ‘protector’ for what it comes to think of as its ‘child’ and, in fact, the creature is preparing the ‘protected’ for rebirth: as a future Shoggoth.`
MAP: `How?`
Greenius: `In the Greek myth of `Jason and the Argonauts`, who go in search of the Golden Fleece, Jason is symbolically the transcendent man. The Cyclops, Polyphemus, the Argonauts and Jason encounter in a cave on an island in the course of their voyaging is, as it were, his unacknowledgedly simple side, which eats and drinks and little else; because outside of movies that`s what people are for: eating and drinking away from public scrutiny. That`s why they build houses and don`t live in caves much anymore. Jason`s simplicity is metamorphosed, through his heroic struggle against gods, demi-gods, demons, and other creatures, into the Shoggoth, symbolized by the Golden Fleece, which heals all ills, conferring immortality and godhead, because she`s mum and represents food and drink rather than invasion of privacy by secret agents of the government who want to watch her in bed with you.`
Scene XXIV
Scenes from the various films of Jason and the Argonauts (1963, 2000 et al) encounter with the one-eyed Cyclops, Polyphemus, in a cave on an island. Polyphemus is blinded by Jason and the crew of the Argonaut ship. The theatre audience sees Greek houses before more modern 21st century residences are seen. Jason is in bed with a woman inside a New York apartment with a CCTV camera above the bed. The cinema audience see the monitor of the two people in their apartment being carefully screened by security.
MAP: `Because that`s where they think mum`ll be?`
Greenius: `Yes, that`s why Jason travels so much. Because the government are starving him of food at home, so he has nowhere to live. Just in case he`s sleeping with his mum.`
MAP: `So wars are waged to prevent Jason from sleeping with his mum and drive him back into his cave?`
Greenius: `Yes, it`s called `human history`.`
MAP: `Man emerges from the cave to be accused of sleeping with his mum and is then driven back into his cave by the governments of the Earth who don`t want him to eat and drink in a house in case he`s sleeping with his mum secretly.`
Scene XXIV
A cartoon scene in which a caveman emerges from a cave is followed by scenes in which he builds civilization before being driven out of his house where he`s sleeping with his wife and back into his cave by the governments of the Earth who don`t want him to.
Greenius: `What if the Shoggoth doesn’t find its host sympathetic?`
MAP: `She doesn`t. Women have their own penis, so it’s quite clear. Enhancing its original talents through mum`s host womb, the parasite enthuses her with ambition and drive to achieve what she thinks of as her own desires, which of course she has no interest in, for example, wars and exterminations.`
MAP: `What’s the Shoggoth’s interest then?`
Greenius: `She`s emotional, and so needs to feel emotion, which need the parasite feeds her with, and so she feels as if the parasite is interested in her; because there aren`t any of her own human species to show her real love.`
MAP: `Psychological vampirism.`
MAP nods his comprehension.
Greenius: `Exactly.`
The djinn of the S.O.S boat that looked like an Aladdin’s lamp`s ears become even more green in a way very becoming to the Greenius.
MAP: `How can you tell the difference between one who is beloved of a Shoggoth and one who is a victimizer of a Shoggoth in parasitical vampirism?`
The Greenius replies flatly.
Greenius: `One wears a pink beret and the other doesn`t.`
MAP: `Oh -`
MAP looks tongue-tied because he can`t think of anything more appropriate to say; even if he’d been allowed to speak further.
Greenius: `- only upon death is it apparent whether or not the host has been victim or child, but the hatchment rate is poor, maybe one in a billion could-be Shoggoth’s make it even if they`re amongst those who`re chosen by the Shoggoth to be Shoggothified.`
MAP looks interested and with his enthusiasm now fully aroused. The Greenius is now sporting a pink beret.
MAP: `What happens in that case?`
Greenius: `The human structural components dissolve in the usual way of death and decay, but the essence; soul, spirit – whatever you choose to call it – remains to become the centre of a new structure which is the new Shoggoth.`
MAP: `Sounds simple.`
MAP breathes deeply, somehow troubled by what he`s hearing.
Greenius: `It is - and it isn’t. The essence of the host is imprisoned/protected within a gaseous envelope, which becomes more concentrated and crystalline upon its demise, and a period of incubation for the egg-like prism follows in which its occupant is vulnerable. If the ‘egg’ can be destroyed, then there will be no new Shoggoth nativity. But the parent Shoggoth is usually ferocious in its defense of its ‘Chosen One’. No one, believe me, would try to come between a Shoggoth and a host it had chosen to protect rather than devour.`
`The Tribble Mother.`
Scene XXV
Scenes of tribbles purring and satisfied with Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise. Tribbles ate food supplies in the hold of the Federation vessel, the Enterprise, in the Star Trek (1965-) science fiction television series` Episode # 15, Season 2, `The Trouble With Tribbles`. The Enterprise was asked to guard Deep Space Station K7`s Quadrotriticale grain, which was scheduled to be transported to Sherman`s Planet to feed the colonists there, and the cuddlesome tribbles ate it by being cute enough to be loved by humans there too.
Scene XXVI
Greenius: `The disadvantages associated with being the pet of a Shoggoth are great, if the Shoggoth chooses to devour the soul of its host rather than bless it with the gift of eternal power.`
MAP inquires with sudden blunt Northern briskness.
MAP: `What’s this one doing then?`
The alien supposes.
Greenius: `Vampiristically draining the emotional energies of its worshipful adherents, I suppose; in order to protect its hatchling: if I’m not mistaken.`
MAP: `You mean this could be a one in a billion chance in a lifetime?`
Scene XXVII
MAP and the Greenius amid the assembled throng of talking humans looking askance at the pyramid of well connected bodies look upwards to where they`re keeping mum about things.
Greenius: `In more ways than one. It is, to say the least, unusual for anyone to be vouchsafed an opportunity to view the mewlings of a Shoggoth infant, but it seems we are to be honoured in that way for some inexplicable – at least to me – purpose,`
MAP’s green-skinned acquaintance pauses for breath and dramatic impact.
`Unless the Shoggoth needs help, in which case our skills as midwives may be about to be put to the test. Follow me.`
Scene XXVIII
The green genie increases its pace, surprising MAP by the speed of its surge, and enters the portico of the temple with the Greenius` gigantic-in-comparison Space Marine ally striving to appear unobtrusively at-hand-in-case-of-emergencies.
Act VIII
Scene I
The portico is not barred against them but, as they enter, a portcullis of medieval proportion clangs against the flagstones of the porch causing sparks and chips of masonry to fly as its dead weight is, rather than carefully lowered, carelessly dumped.
Scene II
MAP: `Well, at least we’re in -`
MAP turns to peer at the early morning sunlight through the crisscross of rusty bolted iron bars.
MAP: `- and somebody definitely doesn’t want us to leave.`
MAP muses to himself cursorily examining those miniature impact craters created in the masonry by the spearheads at the base of the latticed ironwork.
Greenius: `I don’t want to worry you, but we’re not alone.`
Scene III
About-facing MAP quickly scans the temple’s interior; his cyborg component telling him that, according to infra-red image sensors, there are at least four humanoid figures awaiting their next move. But his eyes could have told him that much. From where he was standing, two figures can be seen, both female. They`re pyramidical in shape. Each six-armed figure’s tongue is thrust between her teeth extending to below the jaw line where it flicks back and forth, to and fro, its point forked, redly wet. MAP watches entranced, for a second or two, as the female pair project their tongues to the fullest extent and, as they do so, a blue burning between and above the shining lights of their eyes, heralds the blurring and apparent melting of skin as, at first struggling fitfully, then with more obvious haste and strength, the great eye of the Shoggoth, above the pyramid of worshipful adherents, bursts open. Its tri-lidded blink about the three sided and cornered triangular socket flaps randomly for a while before, focus being maintained, the lids ceased their commotion, relaxing quiescently in pancake-like folds besides the watchful pyramidicals.
Scene IV
Greenius: `Looks like a job for Superman.`
The alien mumbles in a voice that seemed suddenly desolate and without hope.
MAP: `You’re not as green as you’re cabbage-looking,`
Scene V
He clutches his head suddenly as, in response to the proximity of the Shoggoth, pain is already shooting through that spot in his brain, which precedes the sundering of his own forehead, and the liberating of the amazing abilities of his own third eye. Bracing himself, MAP evinces surprise at the mildness of the ray being emitted from his recently awakened orb. His own surprise is outweighed only by the interest it`s arousing in the pyramidicals, now four in number, the second pair having emerged from the shadows to flank their sisters in anticipation of ...
Scene VI
Flashforward to a bar in the future. MAP is holding forth with a drink in his hand. The scene is reminiscent of the cocktail lounge in the starship Enterprise run by black actress, Whoopi Goldberg, in the role of Gainan in the revived Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94) TV series. The human characters, who`d been observing the Shoggoth at the apex of the flesh sculpture, are gathered there to listen; the Balrog, the Ganesh, the Satire, the Nymph and the Pyramidicals.
MAP: `Part of my awareness knew what was occurring, but the greater part remained simply an onlooker, a bystander, a spectator at an extraordinary event of which the outcome had been foreknown from the beginning of creation.`
Scene VII
Blue beams of Pyramidical light criss-cross the stillness of the intervening air, lightning fast yet softly spoken communications flashed between the five figures, who now included MAP with his own third eye ablaze with abilities undreamt of by ordinary mortals. A pyrotechnical feather-light display of laser-light, instantaneous gigabytes of computerist codifications, burst of hieroglyphical imagery, explosions of colourful symbolisms, photonic streams of almost-heard but never-spoken semaphoric neo-speech and telepathic blasts of need/ desire/ request/ command. Then it was over. The Pyramidicals folded their legs and arms before, refolding their triune lids about their third eye, sat cross-legged before their would-be inquisitor, watching two-eyed and waiting, waiting...
Scene VIII
MAP intones hypnotically.
MAP: 'The One who wants to be born. She waits within.'
So saying, MAP stumbles forward, his less than sanguine confederate dragged along in his wake.
Greenius: 'Tralfalmadore was never like this.'
The Greenius mock complains.
Greenius: `Correction! Or so I'm told. Myself, I`ve never been to the fabled world of Vonnegutian folklore famous for its Ice-9 lollys and Piano bars.`
The oddly transfigured SpaceMarine rasps huskily.
MAP: 'Hush. Do not disturb the birthing module saucerer. We are called to perform a wondrously worthy task.'
The greenie of the S.O.S boat that looked more-like-a-lamp interrupts.
Greenius: 'Did you think that David Bowie was good in the movie, The Man Who Fell To Earth?'
MAP announces, seemingly restored to himself once more.
MAP: 'I think he would have been better off with a 'Silver Machine' rather than that Tin.'
'`Silver Machine` was Hawkwind, wasn't it?'
The Greenius ponders while the track `Silver Machine` by Hawkwind can be heard distinctly.
Greenius: `Yes, that`s it.`
MAP's supraconscious aspect reasserts its Superegocentricism and he bellows grandiosely in the style of an opera singer.
MAP: 'Enough of the discography! The infant resides!'
Act IX
Scene I
In the centre of the chamber is a columnar pedestal upon which is placed an aquarium with a single blue occupant swimming back and forth in some obvious anxiety. On closer inspection, the fish tank is a more sophisticated artefact than it seemed.
MAP: 'Cryogenics.'
Scene II
The first word MAP thinks of springs to his mind like snowdrops and we see snowdrops unfolding in a time lapse photographic sequence that lasts a few seconds where in nature the process might take all day and night.
MAP: `Mother.`
Scene III
Baywatch`s Pamela Anderson running along the beach in a bikini so that the milk of human kindness can be seen to be believable.
Greenius: `Mother.`
Scene IV
A scene from a wild and stormy distant planet with two sun stars in the heavens, and a blue and red moon, while a giant orange world, with rings like Jupiter`s in Earth`s solar system, looms above a soft jelly like substance with the appearance of gravy as it floats on a sea of iridescent pink moistiness.
Scene V
The container MAP thought at first instance cryogenic is unusual in itself. The stuff of which it is constructed affords the observer a clear view of what is going on inside, and it feels warm to the touch.
MAP: `Warm.`
MAP dissuades the fingers of the Greenius reaching out to touch the container. The Greenius pulls back the fingers and palm of his hand in alarm.
MAP: `Lest the heatful sensation should provide a preliminary to fiercer energies held in reserve.`
Scene VI
The clarity within the container is, on second glance, illusory. Water vapour condenses to course in rivulets that obscure the walls of the glassy casing. More interesting than the casing are the rivulets themselves which, defying the laws of gravity, flow vertically and horizontally as well as crosswise and in serpentine squiggles and loops.
MAP: `I find myself forced to conclude the whole thing to be alive.`
The captain of the S.O.S boat in a flat monotone that displays no sign of any emotion he might or might not (or might not even be able to) feel.
Greenius: `I believe that you are confirmed in that supposition by the appearance of that larger longer pseudopodia that is now detaching itself from the side of the container to pick up the reluctant (judging by its frantic efforts to remove itself to the further shore of its swimming pool) occupant before holding it upwards and outwards in the direction of us; the intruders.`
MAP: 'It's an eye?'
MAP looks in astonishment.
Greenius: 'Yes, eye can see.'
Scene VII
The arm of the creature extends itself and the eye returns to its self-imposed fitness regime of pulling itself through the water from shore to shore of the aquarium.
Greenius: 'Can we go now?'
The Greenius pulls on MAP`s trouser legs as if he were a small child at a carnival who wants candy floss.
MAP: 'We've only just got here.'
MAP reproves the Greenius as if he were its parent. The Greenius affects an air of supreme indifference in order to keep MAP irritatedly annoyed.
Greenius: 'Well, the Shoggoth infant seems happy enough, so what's there to do?'
Scene VIII
The pugnacious outworlder assertively begins to to walk away in the direction of the somewhat drastically lowered portcullis only to be turned back by a quartet of arm-waving Pyramidicals, tongues protruding almost to the breastbone, and their third eyes blazing with lightning-bolt intensity.
Scene IX
The Greenius blares.
Greenius: 'Okay. OKAY! I get the message. There's something we can do for you?'
The genie feigns innocence, and is treated to a blistering display of arm waggling, tongue gyrating and Pyramidical illuminations.
MAP: 'Evidently so.'
MAP turns and walks directly towards the camera so that the audience can see him coming until the screen blacks out. He seems to have made a decision in a way that is unclear and so decidedly indecisive.
Scene X
The operation is apparently successfully underway. MAP is conscious throughout the whole procedure. The tentacular liquid within the crystalloid box fashions itself into cool plasmatic surgical tools and MAP's frontal lobe is probed before the switch is tripped to uncover the complex web of cellular cyber thread inside which throbs the blue brightness of his own 'borg enhanced pineal gland.There is no distinguishable pain on MAP`s features.
Scene XI
The saucerer, adding his own careful expertise in spaceship mechanics, interrupts the 'op' on only three occasions. We see him relaxed in the bar ostensibly aboard the starship Enterprise talking to the Balrog, the Ganesh, the Satire, the Nymph, and the Pyramidicals. The Greenius is explaining why he interrupted MAP`s operation.
Greenius: `Not because I knew what I was doing. Saucerers aren't made up of the same stuff as men. Especially men like MAP. I knew that by then. I admit it. I wanted the thing to think that I knew what I was doing, so that it would be more circumspect in its tinkering when it was inside the Space Marine's brain box and MAP was with me.`
MAP: `Neither of us can recall agreeing to the surgery.`
Scene XII
Time lapse photography shows that, by the clock in the operating theater, an an hour or so passes without either of the mismatched twosome so much as blinking because of the intensity of their concern with the transplanting of the Shoggoth infant, and afterwards MAP's frontal lobe has a new occupant. The 'borg component hasn't been discarded, the camera shows the audience, but the eye has been incorporated into MAP`s optics and the camera shows that the eye is even now putting forth its own creeping living tendrils, weaving and interweaving with MAP's own synapses, ganglions, and cyberfibres to produce.
Scene XIII
Greenius with the humans seated in the cocktail lounge aboard the Enterprise.
Greenius: `We didn`t know what kind of hybrid creature would surface?`
Scene XIV
Towards the end of the implantation MAP's green genie finds itself unable to stop a procedure it perceives as unusual, a trepanning at the front of the skull, which seemed to serve no useful function, but happened so fast it was unable to prevent it.
Greenius: `Oh!`
The Greenius looks alarmed and then disappointedly upset as the surgeon performs a startlingly quick trepanning with what looks like a mason`s awl and a mallet.
MAP: `Ouch!`
Scene XV
The audience is treated to more of the colorful metalanguage of hieroglyphical cryptograms pumped into MAP from one of the Shoggoth eye's nanny limbs. A miniscule eye develops at the tip of a peculiarly designed pseudopodia resembling an oboe, with overtones of cello and viola, for specifically this purpose. Shapes and symbols crystallize in MAP`s mind, which the audience in the cinema read as .. URGENT ... URGENT ... from a newsroom reporter`s scrolling text at the base of the screen as the theatre goers perceive that they`ve been watching a `live` news broadcast of the `event`.
Scene XVI
Greenius: 'The Shoggoth father-mother tells the here -'
The alien points at its tee-vee aerial.
Greenius: '- that if there are any doubts about its offspring's intentions towards you after death, that is, if you're not sure whether the Shoggoth is going to confer Shoggothdom upon your soul, or eat it, then you have to perform a special ritual or exorcism involving the participation of one woman (the Shoggoth host's wife, that is) and twelve 'just men and true' in which your brain case must be opened by the wife in the presence of the disciples and the Shoggoth removed and destroyed before it can reach the seat of your mind's essence and, devouring it, resurrect your corpse to live forever as an emotion parasite.'
MAP: 'You mean I have to get married?'
MAP looks horrified at this new idea; the mere thought of it sends pearls of sweat coursing along the groove in his back.
Scene XVII
The audience sees the pearls of sweat coursing along the groove in MAP`s back underneath his shirt.
Scene XVIII
Greenius: 'Or the Shoggoth will devour your soul -'
The Greenius of the S.O.S boat that-looked-like-a-sauce-boat-that-looked-like-a-lamp (an Aladdin's lamp, that is) pauses for emphasis.
Greenius: '- and the girl has to be a Christian.'
MAP: 'A Christian what?'
Greenius: 'It`s an old tradition, but the Shoggoth seems impressed with it, so much so that it seems only a Christian girl - '
MAP interjects.
MAP: `Are there any rules about hair color?'
The Greenius repeats and reiterates sternly.
Greenius: '- only a Christian girl, but with a great deal of faith and love for her task of redeeming the fallen from a state damned without `woman`s seed` to alleviate their fate as male brained criminals engaged in an endless war against her race lest she develop her own intelligence and leave for the planets and stars above ...`
Scene XIX
The alien casts significant glances at the congealing blobs of putrescence that a few minutes before had wielded surgical implements with skilful precision in the operating theatre but have now decayed as disposable hospital androids are supposed to.
Greenius: '... can rid him of the threat of devourment by a Shoggoth gone bad.'
MAP: 'Anything else? My innocent look belies the stormclouds gathering upon and about my brow and at my temples.`
Greenius: 'Yes.'
The alien speaks in an offended tone.
Greenius: `It annoys me that you persist in attempting to avoid facing reality.`
Scene XX
MAP, `looking sheeps eyes` at the camera, adopts a cockney accent familiar to those who`ve seen Dick Van Dyke`s chimney sweep character in the movie, Mary Poppins (1964), starring Julie Andrews, and also to readers of the Victorian novelist, Charles Dickens.
MAP: 'I`s sincerely hopes I`s don`t fit to you`s.`
MAP hops, from one leg to another, hopfully. As if he`s in the Oliver Twist (1960) musical asking for more gruel from Mr Bumble. The Greenius gives him a cap to twist, and a few bars from `Food, Glorious Food` can be heard as if coming from a Dickensian workhouse somewhere nearby.
MAP: `Is there any more, sir?`
Greenius: 'Very funny. Not. The girl also has to organise a god-eating ceremony in which the cadavre, that is, the Shoggoth host, is ritually eaten by the thirteen participants in the ritual de-Shogging and dismembering of the corpse.'
Scene XXI
MAP`s corpse is dismembered by the thirteen and ritually consumed in bowls of gruel to the tune of `Food, Glorious Food`.
MAP: 'And if I don't marry?'
Greenius: `I assume that you`re inquiring more in hop than certainty, but the Shoggoth may have chosen to parent you rather than suck out your brains.`
Scene XXII
A Shoggoth sucking out someone`s brains through a straw usually used for soft drinks bought in places where Pepsi and Coca Cola are to be had.
Scene XXIII
The Shoggoth is seen dancing in a commerical for Popsi cola, which is very similar to the real Brintey Splurts` Popsi cola commercial widely popular on the North American continent.
MAP: 'I'll give it some serious thought.
Scene XXIV
MAP thunks the data until the garbage icon in his compuborg cortex indicator reads, FULL.
Scene XXV
MAP: 'Now, how am I going to get out of this mess you got us into greenie?'
Greenius: 'Ask the Shoggoth?'
MAP: 'Good idea.'
Scene XXVI
MAP`s agreement is accompanied by the camera showing that he`s mentally activated his third-eye so that the Shoggoth eye is now linked in.
MAP: 'Here goes -'
The alien observes unnecessarily.
Greenius: 'Nothing seems to be happening, MAP.'
MAP: 'Look again.'
Scene XXVII
MAP gestures at the portcullis which, shimmering in a sickly ochre of brown fizziness, intensifies momentarily and amidst evaporated iron, masonry, sculpture and flagstones, a jaggedly molten aperture appears like the maw of some still-bleeding creature of hate ...
Scene XXVIII
MAP: 'Time Out.'
MAP makes the traditonal `T` sign with the one hand held out with the palm down and the fingers of the other hand pointing straight up against it.
Scene XXIX
MAP Pushes the saucerer before him to protect the smaller fry from the driblets of molten listed building splashing around them like fat bursts from a too hot pan.
Scene XXX
MAP activates his 'borg compsole to key in his invisi-suit's force-shield and shoulder aside large chunks of glowing red brick descending with forceful impact from the disturbed dome that, as they look back in horrified wonder, begins to slowly collapse in upon itself. For a few seconds, the Shoggoth, atop the remaining mound of stone and flesh, teeters at the zenith of her achievement. Her horripilating head hurled back in rage and defiance at the stars and deathly sickle moon above. Her wildly otherworldly eye stares wide, straining as if to see something beyond her ordinary ken. Her searchlight beacon searches the heavens for a sign, an instant, a second, a flash of recognition from its lost home amid the starry empyrean.
Scene XXXI
At the last, as the support beneath it buckles, is gone, the Shoggoth hurls herself towards the nearest light's beacon, the scimitar-shaped moon, and she hangs there for a second, two, three, then falls; but in the moment of her falling comes an answering flash, a bolt of fire, a shape, a collision, a snarl of rage ... or ... can it be triumph?
Scene XXXII
The sky above is black; the dome is gone; the remaining structure folds in upon itself. But the people are nowhere to be seen. Something begins to descend upon our not-so-gruesome twosome, vaguely round and pointed at one end with a kind of lid-thing at the top ... and what looks like a handle?
Act X
Narrator: `Just how the Shoggoth had been able to command the S.O.S boat to magically arise and rescue her from disaster MAP couldn't tell, but the saucerer had know-how to express its gratitude once MAP, in a Pyramidical eye-to-eye conversation between father-mother and Shoggoth offspring, was made to hypnagogically understand that the shaggy cyclops wished to return to her Tibetan homeland to live amongst the Yeti.`
Scene I
Scene of Shoggoth and MAP standing in close proximity to one another while she transmits from herself`s mind direct to MAP`s own, pictures of the Shoggoth`s desire to return to her mountain fastnesses in Tibet. Beautiful scenes featuring the Shoggoth at peace with her acolytes engaging in their rituals of adoration unfold and refold for the gratuitous pleasure of the cinema goer and the director`s insatiable egotism. The Shoggoth walks along terraces of Buddhist sanctuaries while the acolytes bang tambourines and celebrate sunshine and nudity.
Scene II
MAP: 'In evolutionary terms, they're like dogs are to us, but, then, we're like dogs to them.`
Scene III
MAP leaves an unspoken question hanging in the air and the audience can see the question mark, blue like the Fantastic Four symbol.
Scene IV
Greenius: 'I`ll have the same as her.`
The Greenius smiled in a greenly enigmatic way.
Greenius: 'We'll write, I suppose.'
Scene V
The genius of the S.O.S Boat supposes as MAP pointedly mkes a `Time Out` signal and points his pointing finger to the stars while raising an imaginary teacup to his lips.
Scene VI
MAP remarks on the pointy-headedness of the Greenius.
MAP: 'Of course, my pointy-headed friend.'
MAP breezes on breezily; an all-but merry twinkle appearing in the corner of his eye, which his alien visitor, slightly embarassed at this overwhelming display of affection from the Great Man, pretends not to see.
MAP: 'Where to; after you drop off your passenger?'
Scene VII
MAP glances warily at the figure of the Shoggoth cramped into the luggage space behind the S.O.S. Boat's command seat; its single saucerous eye balefully glaring back at him.
Greenius: `The poor creature is searching for some hint of empathy, sympathy, apathy ... in fact any emotion she can grab on to and ... nourish herself with.`
MAP: 'Will you be alright with her?'
MAP looked doubtful.
'Oh yes. I have an emote-cancelling shield that I can switch on at will.'
The Greenie, switches on at will his emote-cancelling shield.
MAP: 'Oh ... good.'
MAP tries to grin wholeheartedly, slightly taken aback at the thoroughness of the alien's approach to problem solving.
Greenius: 'Bye.'
Scene VIII
The Greenius with the tee-vee aerial in the top of its head teleports itself into the S.O.S Boat's cockpit.
MAP: 'Bye.'
Act XI
Scene I
As Shoggoth and rumplestiltskin clone shoot away into the starry blackness aboard the S.O.S. Boat, MAP walks a few paces forward, turns left and goes over to see what is now transpiring on the Larry King #15 talkshow.
Scene II
Larry is in the process of interviewing two strangely familiar robotic shapes who, brandishing their ceremonial light swords and flexing their knee joints in preparedness, are explaining to Mr King, in slightly bad and machine-like 'Engrish'.
SAM-U-RAY # 1: `The captuled UFO wey'd been detaired to guald at the city's showpiece SONYPAN buirding had disappealed whire we wele combing the sullounding alea for its mysterious green-skinned occupant and a 'lenegade' Space Maline who the monstel had been in cahoots with.`
Canned laughter from the uninvited audience as the duo affirmed in machine-cooled unison.
SAM-U-RAY # 1 and 2: 'We'rr kirr the bastalds.'
'Yes, of course.'
Scene III
Larry King clone #15 laughs, making that time-honoured cutting-of-the-throat movement towards floating camera #4, signalling that commercial break in which an unwanted guest will be summarily executed in the King's studio.
Scene IV
In a flashback the audience sees a former guest pop star being beheaded on the carpet next to where King sits at his table with his popcorn and Seven Up.
Scene V
As the Wind-Up 'droid begins making those wind-up movements with its Toshubishi prosthetic limbs that will 'wind-up' this latest segment of the show, two robotic voices in tandem can be heard, demanding that 'V King' hear out what they had to say.
SAM-U-RAY # 1 and 2: `Ral! Ral! Heal us, baby! You are `V` King!`
Scene VI
The 'droid's internals began to play `Greensleeves` in honour of new guest, Ken Branagh, who is about to begin a stint as Henry VIII on Broadway. The theatre monitor shows scenes from the movie, Henry V, while the renowned thespian is seen dancing sprighly down a staircase that exists for no other reason than so that he can dance down it. Meanwhile, off camera Larry can be throatily heard wooing the audience for the imminent Branagh interview.
Scene VII
Larry King clone # 15: `I, `V King`, object most strongly to the use of the `V King` word in my presence, but I am prepared to forgive that, if 'V King' is either a reference to my 'stage' name, 'The King', that is, a pronunciation problem arising due to the SONYPAN programers' obsession with authentically-stupid-sounding Japanese for their SAM-U-RAY, or a misconception about my cloned status, which is clone XV rather than -.`
Lar shows the canned audience the `V` sign amidst a storm of mirth and the Larry King clone # 15 show theme as we head for a commercial break.
Act XII
Scene I
MAP, baffled by the whole thing, puts his feet up on a nearby pouffe, nestles more comfortably into the armchair he'd been relaxing in, sips from a cup of tea.
Scene II
We see scenes of great and wondrous relaxed beauty amongst the Yeti and the Shoggoth in Tibet with their nude followers and ritualistic Tantric sex.
MAP: 'I bet they're not drinking tea.'
Scene III
MAP, smiling cryptically to himself and the audience, smokes a joint.
Robin Bright 'The House That Map Built: A Play' in John Thiel (ed.) Surprising Stories # 40, Oort Cloud Publications, VacHume Press, January, 2016, http://surprisingstories.thiels.us/SSV40/HouseMap.htm .
Robin Bright 'The House That Map Built: A Play' in John Thiel (ed.) Surprising Stories # 40, Oort Cloud Publications, VacHume Press, January, 2016, http://surprisingstories.thiels.us/SSV40/HouseMap.htm .