wildcat

His sweat is engineered chemicals that tell him what to do. His body has been redesigned to deliver specific information to his conscious mind through the taste of his sweat. Entire encyclopedias can be stored in average bodily secretions now; he once saw his old partner, Charlie, coughing up bile that contained the entire works of Herman Melville. Himself, he gets mission parameters and documentation that he can peruse while his latest conquest is showering in the other room—Simone, her name's Simone. He licks his sweaty arm while he lies in the abused bed and the triggers fire off what exactly his purpose is. They give you a shot before you go out into the field—after that, at the appointed time, your sweat will unfold the story. Where to go, who to talk to, where to stick the money when he's done. He'll pack Simone away and get to work.

The shower stops but for the soft drip-drip-drip of a hotel faucet. Simone paces back and forth in the bathroom. He licked her, during, and tasted no stories or information. Oh, to have normal sweat glands again. She almost tasted...

Simone stands at the foot of the bed, fully clothed. Fortunate that she doesn't expect some post-coital spooning or emotion. It occurs to him that he's having trouble moving—is he sore? Did she do something to his back, midway through? "My saliva," she says. "Slow-acting paralytic." She gives a curt laugh, an act, an impersonation of an evil villain. Is this really happening? But her sweat! "I suppose you'd expect my sweat to do the talking for me, but I prefer to give nothing away."

He tries to ask what she wants, although he clearly remembers her licking at his collarbone. Damn. Should have checked her tongue, but some days you don't want to have to check every possible sex partner's tongue for adaptations.

"Your sweat," she says, while she slides her feet into those long leather boots. "It screamed. Talked immediately. I didn't even have to torture it for hours." She smiles. Ugly. They were...they were doing it and she was reading him! Like a book! In the middle! "Don't worry," she says while she grabs her jacket and pulls it on, heading for the door. "You'll be able to move again in roughly two hours. If I'd wanted to kill you, we would have gone bareback."

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.

Actually the problem was that he watched too many Frankenstein movies when he was a little boy and so the ideas that fruited inside his head regarding "mortality" were a little strange. This was nobody's fault, certainly not television's—he's just one of those people, where reality is maybe a little too flexible. He spent most of his adolescence trying to imbue gross, inanimate matter with life. Lightning rods, semen and cursing, sort of thing. He wanted to get girls pregnant just to see what would happen but you can guess how that went over—fuck, the boy was a fool, an idiot, a commonplace moron. The kind of person you take out behind the barn and SHOOT, goddamn you, shoot him right through the head because he's certainly not going to be providing you with anything like a realistic view of the situation. Which is more or less what happened when he met Emma, right, because he tried something and she kicked him in the balls and certainly you can feel sorry for him but Emma wasn't about to. Mostly she cussed, and stamped on his forehead with her very large shoes—runners, lots of sole, fat things with treads to leave a mark. Afterward, Emma got pissed and he lay half-in-half-out of an alleyway, trying to remember his name. He went to Hollywood after that.

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.

I started to write a long-winded and whiny review of The Dark Knight, which basically boils down to (a) I'm tired of "realism" being equated to inelegant design and knives being shoved into mouths like a bad prison blowjob routine, (b) women are people too, (c) Michael Caine and Gary Oldman were awesome and (d) fuck, hire a script editor already. But I can't get the energy together and the negativity just doesn't do it for me, so I'd rather talk about how I'd approach doing my own hypothetical Batman movie. Assume that the ghost of Bill Finger has risen from the dead to haunt AOL-Time-Warner and force them to give Batman a Creative Commons copyright as revenge for stripping his name off of Batman for such a long, long time, and prepare to get dirty in the nerdy:

1. If it's going to be a Joker story, I'm watching every single Marx Brothers movie ever made for research. I would do a Joker story as a Marx Brothers flick with knives, guns, bombs, rictus-inducing poison gas, and silk stockings.

2. I would choose a sexy, sleek Batmobile, a Batmobile that oozes charisma and elegance. None of this tank business, none of this stealing equipment off of G.I. Joe when they're off fighting Cobra. Tim Burton had the right idea with his car-as-gothic-phallus, sure, but I'm not Tim Burton. To whit:



3. One goddamn super-villain. Or, alternatively, seven or eight of them, but only one important one, the others being reduced to the status of punch-their-lights-out on the way to the main event. An average night in Gotham should involve multiple cases. I'd also go full bore and use all the ridiculous one-off deals. Have Batman kick the crap out of the Royal Flush Gang, or the Mad Hatter.

4. Three words: Credible Love Interest. In terms of narrative punch and strength of character, Catwoman kicks ass and you can pull in that punch-tights-as-sex angle. A Batman movie has to be horny, all the way through, but it has to feel guilty and icky and ashamed about it -- all desire has to be sublimated. If you want a Gothic Gotham, you have to remember the Gothic Horror Credo: Sex is Bad. If I wasn't going to go with Catwoman, if I wanted a civilian love affair, they'd have to be played by a credible actress who can bring a lot of power to the role. All the memorable leading ladies Batman's dated -- I'm thinking Silver St. Cloud, Jezebel Jet, Talia, et cetera, could go toe-to-toe with Batman, personality-wise.

5. Sidekicks. I don't given a shit that you think Robin's lame, you haven't got a grip on Robin. Robin's cool. Robin refuses to be inky. He's a daredevil. He's mad as hell. He's smart. He thinks he wants to be Batman when he grows up. Robin's presence also prevents "realism," which is for pansies. Even Frank Miller's old fart Bat-Dad in The Dark Knight Returns had a Robin, and a Robin that worked. I'd pick the third Robin, Tim Drake, who got to be Robin purely because he was the first person to deduce who Batman was purely on his own. And Batgirl's even cooler than Robin, and I'd have to include her simply to punch up the dynamic with Jim Gordon. Batman's in a lonely crusade on crime, but that just means he has to build a family. Also, his butler can beat up your butler.

6. Opera. Every fight scene needs to be a modern art piece, a dance number, a punch-drunk ballet sequence with all that sexual frustration running through it.

7. Batman/Bruce Wayne. Delineated by wardrobe choices and actual voice. None of this Chris Nolan hiring a robot to play Batman, plying him on booze and cigarettes. If you can't find an actor who can credibly adjust his voice to be deeper and darker sounding, send him away. Bruce Wayne should be just as much of a nutjob as his enemies, and he should be in the movie a lot. Batman should be three people: the Bat, billionaire idiot Bruce Wayne, and emotionally crippled private Bruce Wayne. Which is why he needs to build himself a family, because all that private Emo time with his parents being dead impedes his war on crime. It leads to self-indulgence.

8. Flashbacks and back story, as Treava pointed out. Sparingly, sure, but they serve an important function: Bruce Wayne is all origin. Batman is defined by that tragic origin, everything springs from it. Which is why he works against the Joker, and this something Nolan successfully didn't fuck up -- the Joker lies constantly, has no origin, too many origins, he works best when you don't know what his back story is and have to wonder constantly at how he became untethered. If you emphasize that Batman is tied up in his origins, petrified and tangled in them, then Joker is that much more terrifying, because he's free. He's utterly, utterly free.

They kept the oracle in the fridge; if not properly refrigerated, it would have gone off, gone sour, begun to show signs of mould and decay. You don't leave an oracle out beside the fruit bowl to make your avocados ripen. Instead, they left the oracle in the fridge and it sat there, mostly, in the dark and cold, beside a plastic litre jug of two percent milk and a packet of tiger prawns destined for dinner time. Sat and waited, gnawed at its lips furtively while listening for the familiar footsteps. The slick cords growing from the back of the oracle, its aborted spinal cord, hung between racks and dripped; they changed the paper towel underneath regularly.

It went on like this for a while. This was the oracle's life: sit in darkness, twitch nervously, while futures play out across eyelids. Try not to smell the baking soda open at the back of the fridge. Say nothing when they open the door, the lights come on, and they rifle through for a snack, or ingredients for a proper meal. Ignore the leftovers that heap up occasionally.

If one has an oracle, the novelty wears off quickly.

But, occasionally. The door opened, the lightbulb ignited, and the girl stood, bent at the waist to peer at the oracle. Not at the vegetables in the crisper, not at the milk, or the half-eaten tortilla salad in the plastic container. At the oracle. The oracle opened its eyes as was expected of it. "Hello, Mistress," the oracle sang. No other prompting necessary -- let's face it, it would have been a terrible oracle if it didn't know when it was wanted.

"Hello." The girl huffed. "Hello, you horrible thing." She didn't buy the oracle, that was her father, he was the one to pick it up at a no-good flea market ten minutes outside town. He was a man always on the lookout for a bargain. Knowing the future, he'd said, is a major bargain. The girl was easy to read. She didn't like the wet-blue skin stretched across the oracle, how it was little more than a mouth and a chin, and she wondered often who'd been butchered to make it. But she never asked, and the oracle wasn't about to answer an unasked question. Letter of the law.

"What knowledge do you seek, Mistress?"

"Only, see," said the girl. Inwardly, the oracle sighed. She had a habit of starting in the middle of a sentence. How on Earth did she get her point across to people who didn't have access to any and every secret on Earth? The girl straightened up, grabbing a can of orange pop and flicking the tab open as she did. "I was at this party last night, right, and there's this guy -- I'm not saying I'm interested or anything, but." The oracle waited. It was good at waiting. It waited for the girl to finish her question. It already knew the question and it knew the answer, but again: rules. "But he starts talking about it being impossible to meet suitable single women and then he says. He says there's always me, but, I'm unavailable? What the hell does that mean?"

The oracle gnawed at its lips while it took in the question, turquoise tongue licking at them irritably. The oracle was grown to preside over nations, advise kings, lead heroic women and men on great adventures. It knew that the girl's father was having an affair behind her mother's back; it knew the names of meteors destined to one day hit the planet and end all civilization. It was not meant to answer pointless questions of romantic entanglement that would lead nowhere, ever, no matter what the girl thought.

"...hello?" She waved a hand in front of the oracle and then took a long, desperate sip of her orange pop. "Do I have to bow down before you in supplication or whatever? Look, the party was this terrible Noel Coward affair, you know. I want to know what he meant, Oracle, I want to know what he meant by saying I was unavailable."

The problem was, the family rarely wanted to hear what the oracle had to say. It pried its lips apart and began to speak. They wanted a mute therapist, or someone to remind them of appointments. They wanted traffic reports. They did not want to know the truth, the future, or anything similar. It was tiresome. It was a waste. But it was something the oracle knew. "Men suck, Mistress," the oracle said, after a moment.

Well, it was the difference between the fridge and the trashcan, wasn't it?

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.

[Borrowed Michael's camera for about five minutes last night at the Luminara Festival in Beacon Hill Park. Took a couple shots. Shot across one of the ponds, looking over at Douglas Street. Typically, all the actual festival stuff was going on behind me.]

Dead killer whale, belly-up on top of a broken cottage—beautiful, perfect cover image, they'd win a Pulitzer for sure. Lara already had her pocket voice recorder switched on when the three of them met in front of the ruins, seawater up to their waists. Barely able to maneuver in the hip-waders, twenty-year-old Sam Hill stumbling around with her digital camera gripped firmly. Stormy with nothing in his hands, because he preferred to work from memory as Lara recalled from the newsroom. Two reporters and one photographer from the Word of the Weird Weekly, tasked with a very specific assignment: figure out why the hell a shit town like Carvelle now had a good chunk of ocean on top of it. Stormy stumbled, a sucker-rich tentacle dipping briefly above the water before sinking back down into the murk. "Watch it, twinkle-toes," Lara said, running a hand over what was left of the front gate. Barnacles. She hated the little calcified mouthes.

Stormy would have gone over in a strong gust, to be honest. He scratched at the freckle to the right of his right eye. "I don't see why Edna had to send you out here to help on this. I've been here for two days interviewing people, I don't need more bodies mucking things up." Two days of traipsing through a town half a mile wide, maybe, with grime in his hair and people holed up in the community center. They wanted help from the government, not strange reporters from some nobody magazine.

"You handle the human side." Lara ran a hand over a dead flipper. "Do we know whose house this is?"

"Beatrice Goode." Stormy took a few water-addled steps in the opposite direction, to roughly the front door. "She's still under there, apparently—they think this other guy, Roger Fiddle, was with her. The busybodies are already talking, you know what I mean? Gossip doesn't die."

"Well," said Sam, from five feet away. "The composition's going to be terrible, I can tell you that. I hate working with milky light." She scraped at the back of her shaved head and lined up another shot, clicking repeatedly from slightly shifted angles. "I would have brought a tripod, but this water's impossible." Junior photographer under Billsy, who knew what drew her to the Word in the first place. Edna was very careful about who had access to the personnel files, not that this usually stopped Lara when she really needed some information. They'd worked together once before, six months before, Sam taking pictures while Lara tracked a homicidal maniac with a playing card fetish and a habit for not dying. It was all a bit comic book, but Sam had been eminently trustworthy even if she did turn into a terrible drunk if you said the word "beer" to her. "But you'll get your dream cover, Lara, and I expect to be showered in awards and champagne for this." Better than salt crusting in one's toes and the constant smell of brine.

Lara cleared her throat and fussed pointlessly with the voice recorder. "I love that a possibly major act of God—I mean, have we figured out if anyone's randomly building an arc in these parts?—can't stop little old ladies from arguing over whether or not some old codgers were boinking behind people's backs." A dead eel floated past her, and she knew for certain that she'd never be able to go to a sushi restaurant again. "Have you got enough to put together some human interest sidebar crap for this, Stormy? What the survivors are doing to repair?" Edna expected half an issue's contents ready in three days' time, but she was like that. There'd be at least one drunken phone conversation in Lara's future, with screaming, cursing, and begging for deadline reprieve. Part of the process.

"I can throw something together. Do we know where all the water came from?"

"I talked to an old friend of mine, marine biologist, he happened to mention the Pacific Ocean's been—well—fluctuating lately, could be what caused it." At least nobody had said the A-word yet. Lara didn't really feel like doing a UFO exposé right now. "The science never makes sense anyway, and you know how much Edna hates big words—though if we can throw around teleportation she might get that glazed, nostalgic look. Easy to get a better Christmas bonus when she's like that."

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.

Lobsters dive-bombed. Old Roger Fiddle, standing wretched in his little red vest, banged at Biddy Goode's door while heaps of fish and seawater fell from the heavens—muck working its way into his boots to lick at arthritic toes. Green-slicked mud everywhere. "Open the bloody door, woman!" Roger scraped mossy fingernails over grotty wood. Trout, herring, whole schools of salmon. Fat sharks. Salt water dribbled down into the corners of his mouth—an ocean's tears. Fat lot of good that did anyone. "Biddy Goode!" The woman was impossible at the best of times, still mad at him for all those little arguments, what happened that one time when they were much younger and firmer. He pounded louder. Now was not the time for her to drag out old disagreements. An octopus heaved and thrashed drunkenly on the front walkway while jellyfish landed on top of it in droves. A hammerhead shark hit the station wagon parked across the street.

The door slipped inward with Biddy Goode's fingers wrapped along its edge, and then her eye and ear appeared within the darkened hallway. "Roger—" She yelped as he pushed her in, then shut the door behind them. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" She smelled of radishes, almost pleasant after the fish market clinging to the outside world. She turned to her hand, briefly, then slapped him across the face like an afterthought. So it was going to be like that, was it?

Roger pried open the blue lace curtain drawn across the door's inset window. "We're having one of them biblical plagues," he said, and jabbed at the glass. "Or flood's a-coming. My knee's been acting up something fierce." Crabs exploded against cobbles. "Might be the end of the world." Water arced against the pane and Biddy Goode dug her fingers into his arm. Thump-thump-thump, fish hitting the roof. Thump-thump-thump.

"Nonsense. The world hasn't ended since I was a very little girl." And the girl! To have been there. Little blonde ringlets, appled cheeks, scraped knees. Climbing all over her mother. The smell of fine herbs drifted by to mix with the radishes. They stepped, side-by-side, into the sitting room. Biddy Goode had been having tea—a little china cup beside a little china teapot. Not expecting company, she'd foregone the doilies. "You've got a starfish tangled in your hair." She patted at his grey hair, pulling and teasing until the offender came loose.

"You don't think it's the flood?"

Biddy Goode waddled over to the teapot and set the starfish done, clapping her hands together and not once looking up at the constant noise of things hitting the roof. The noise was happening more loudly, and much quicker. Spooshes and splashes rose up from outside. "You really are an idiot, Roger. Come here—some jasmine tea will calm you down. I swear, you've been in the most ridiculous state since Martha..." She closed her mouth and poured tea, pressing the cup into his hands afterward.

"Don't you Martha me," he sneered. This had nothing to do with Martha, he wanted to say. The starfish sprawled beside the teapot and he poked at it with the silver sugar tongs laid out. Water spilled in bursts down the chimney. "It doesn't just rain an ocean's contents, woman. Fish don't fall. This is the end of the—"

And then the roof collapsed.

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.

I'm not sure I could answer correctly with what this is, beyond the first scene of something new I'm working on. I already have the second scene on the go and this feels like it might be a longer piece. Think of this as a prologue.

There is a museum in the future. It's a museum of the future, a dynamic educational centre, and when you step out of the jump station fresh from eons in the past, from the twenty-first century or whenever... they ask you step on through and have a look. Acclimatize. Give yourself a moment to just breathe and see what the future's really like, moderated, before you step outside and everything really hits. The signs are done in real neon! Crafted deco-style because Art Deco was in style about ten minutes ago and things in the Museum like to be current.

When Joy first arrived in the future, when she first shuffled through the shining doorway and stepped out onto pale pink floors holding up pale blue ones, they gave her pamphlets. They understood that pamphlets would be familiar. Then they ushered her in the museum's direction.

And she went because it was procedure, she understood museums, and it would give her a couple minutes to figure her head out. She wasn't expecting living, human exhibits. Out past the weird Marilyn Monroes and the rocket ships, the glass seed pods. Living exhibits. Well, "human." They glowed blue in the dim lights, caught behind glass. She fidgeted with her Che Gueverra hat and clutched at her purse look a tourist. Only she was here to live, right?

The people behind glass were -- according to the legend hovering beside them -- people spliced with bioluminescent algae. They sprawled along the walls of their "cage." They held onto each other. They were women, obviously, but lacked cleavage -- just one glorious, fucked up monoboob on each. The hell? They looked like goddesses, like multiple Kalis. Tall like Steph was -- had been. Steph. Joy saw her just the night before! With that new man of hers, at the party, with the hours of drinking. They'd smoked cigarette after cigarette and posed for Michael's camera. Only Steph was dead and had been for a long time, right? The algae muses failed to see her problem, and she started to search through her purse for a cigarette. There had to be one, right? She hadn't left the twenty-first century without one, had she? It would. It would calm her down or whatever. Michael's camera was gone, broken down by now in a landfill somewhere. If they even had landfills.

"Greetings, sweetheart." Joy tried to compose herself even with the heavy breathing and where were her cigarettes? Hell, where was her lighter? Didn't she have them when she went through? The woman speaking to her was tall and bald, with copper-painted skin. She was naked as well, like the algae muses, but she had actual breasts and she even had a navel, which was something. Joy kept her eyes on the woman's face. Apparently the future was all naked Amazons. Wasn't Camille Paglia going to be just thrilled. "You're very new, and you're probably having a panic attack. I can tell, your levels are all over the place. This is normal." The woman held out a hand and Joy found herself taking it. "Acute continuity shock. You'll also be reacting to how clean our air is." Without even a trace of snark.

"Can I. I seem to have lost my cigarettes."

"I can find you some, but they won't be what you're familiar with. I could probably put you in touch with a school of bongfish if you were really desperate, but I wouldn't advise it." The woman tilted her head for a moment, as if listening to something Joy couldn't hear.

Joy tried to remember the lyrics to Nina Simone's song "Four Women," what the last woman's name was. Then she switched to trying to remember her phone number. Telus was a distant dream, surely. The algae women convulsed violently against the glass. "I wasn't expecting any of this. They gave me pamphlets..."

The woman nodded. "Your name is Joy Waller, according to the standard census. This is correct? We've had a few glitches in the last week. A clone of Emma Goldman with Alzheimer's infected part of the network."

"Yeah...it's Joy." She wanted a drink. Somewhere horrible with bras on the ceiling. Actually, who knew what bars were like in the future? And how did the woman know all about her?

"I'm Galatea."

"You wouldn't happen to know where I, uh, could get a drink? With alcohol. If people still drink."

"I know the perfect place. Popular with the immigrants. It's very nurturing. It's called the Womb..."

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.

1. I have seen too many creepy, creepy children in the library. It's not even noon but the Children of the Corn are up and demanding their fucked up Saturday morning cartoons. Too bad it's Friday and they'll have to make do with eating their parents' brains.

2. I do not like when people leave teddy-bear order forms in the printer, particularly when the order forms include the options "dressed bear" and "undressed bear." I do not want to think about the teddy-murder porn you're making with stop-motion animation in the basement. The lighting by the water heater is inadequate down there.

It didn't move like Harry's husband. It looked like him, sure, if a little more abstract. Less like a person and more the idea of a person. It moved awkwardly -- not stiffly, more jaggedly. It hadn't worked out yet, exactly how to smile, and Harry was grateful for that. He wasn't sure how he would have taken the thing smiling at him while he ate his Nutella on toast at the little kitchen table that his husband built not six years ago. During his refurnishing craze. But the thing did speak, managing a voice that approximated his husband's old one. "Are you still hungry, hon? I can make you some eggs." Like that. Like nothing at all. He waved the thing off while he rinsed off the plate and put it in the dishwasher. They used to argue about how often Harry left dishes lying around like it was beneath him to put them in the washer. He made an effort to straighten that habit out.

On the way out, Harry stopped and placed a chaste kiss on the thing's cheek, more out of habit than anything deeper. The thing was not his husband, but he was expected to go through the charade. They'd only been going through the motions for six months now -- according to most studies it might take as long as a year before things felt like normal again. Ha. The very notion. The thing waved at him from the front door and then shut it once he was in the driver's seat with the keys in the ignition. He had to sit through seven hours of work plus an hour's lunch. The thing didn't work. His husband worked, before, at a publishing firm downtown. His husband had been ostensibly good at his job, but the thing felt no need to continue his work.

What did the thing do while he was off at work? The topic never came up at dinner, when the thing was more interested in Harry's day, what had come up at the office. The thing kept the house clean and cooked -- a kind of barter, he supposed -- so he wasn't expected to complain. Even when the thing made strange, "exotic" things for supper, Maybe the thing went and met up with other things during the day, stockpiling more seed-pods and negotiating with the people in power.

He tried not to think about it.

Harry tried to make it through traffic without running into anybody while his mother droned on over the speaker-phone, wondering when they were coming for dinner next. She seemed to get along with the thing just fine, even referred to it by his husband's name like it was his husband and not a thing. "I'll have to check our schedules and confirm with him," he said, changing lanes with barely a pause to look over his shoulder at his blind spot. "I'm on my way to work, Mum, I'll have to call you back later." She told him she loved him and he said the same, hitting the end-call button on the steering wheel.

The office was typical, boring, repetitive. Everybody wandered around with the same haggard, dismal look upon their faces, though some were better at emoting than others. Everybody had a thing at home. Single adult stats were way, way down. Breeding -- inter-breeding -- was suddenly very important, like it was wartime, and maybe war was coming. The government was very careful about what information was available regarding the naturalization programs or what was going on outside the country.

They hadn't wanted children, not really. Talked about it, sure, and his husband had been adamant that they adopt if they wanted one. He didn't really want to think about the thing breeding with him. But all the posters said FOR THE GOOD OF THE NATION, although most people looked a little confused about which nation was under discussion, these days. Harry stopped by Accounting on his way upstairs to flirt with Kenneth, who looked good in spite of the orange tie his thing had picked out for him. Harmless flirting kept him going some days, because at least Kenneth could make a full range of facial expressions and had normal body language and it sounded good when he laughed. Not like the thing's hollow chuckle. After that, he made it the two floors up and ran into Jane coming out of the women's washroom. They made lunch plans. Nice to have a meal with a person. Jane referred to the thing back at her apartment by her boyfriend's name, Jack, because they'd made it to a year and a half now. She wasn't very convincing, but it was prescribed by relationship therapists.

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.