wildcat

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.

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.

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.

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.