books | the pygmies keep dancing

IIII. o naany noony (2)

by braonthree

page fifteen

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I’m walking away and there’s this voice. the voice says:

“ah, you’re here.”

I ignore it. I’ve got my important thinking to do. but the voices pipes up again, a little louder:

“ah, you’re here.” now I’m a little riled, so I turn around and speak up.

“what do you mean by that,” I ask him, “that I’m here. of course I’m here. you wouldn’t be staring at me if I weren’t.

“I mean,” he says, “that I’ve been waiting for you.”

what? what’s the matter with this fool. “do you mean that you’ve just been fussing around in this clearing, waiting for any old someone to come along, or that you’ve been waiting for me?”

“you,” he smiles. “I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve known for a long time that you were coming, and I’ve been waiting for you, and now you’re here. tea?” and he holds up this china cup with a little saucer under it, and weird-looking flowers and creatures painted on it. I’m getting a flipping headache.

“but how could you know I was coming when I didn’t even know I was coming to this clearing until I came?” let the smarty-pants answer that one.

“I’ve simply known it. the same way anyone knows anything, really.”

“you knew I was coming, and you knew it for a long time. do you also know my name, or how old I am, or where I come from?”

“oh yes, I know all of those things. surely those things aren’t supposed to be secrets, are they? tea?”

“not so fast with the tea thing, buster. how did you know? my name, and all the rest. how?”

“the same way anyone…” he starts to say, but I interrupt him. I do this because I can see I’m not getting anywhere with my question. he just keeps saying the same nonsense, like some multi-colored parrot.

“fine, fine, I’ll have some tea.” maybe it will help my headache. I sit down in one of his dainty little chairs and change the subject. “that’s very nice incense you’re burning. does it have a name?”

“it’s called epiphany. I invented this blend myself. so glad you like it. it’s especially for you.”

oh brother. he knew I was coming, he knows my name, he blended incense just for me. hocus-pocus and airy-fairy and my head really hurts. he gives me the tea, and a little plate of sweeties that maybe are chinese.

I change the subject again. the tea and the sweets turn out to be gorgeous. “what was that song you were singing? I don’t think I’ve heard that one before.”

“of course you haven’t heard it before,” and he smiles this ever-so-sweet smile, “I made it just for you. would you like to hear the second verse?”

no, no, I don’t want to hear the stupid second verse. I didn’t even understand the first one. but I can’t say those things out loud and be that rude to someone I’ve just met for the first time, someone who gave me tea and treats. I can’t be that rude at the first meeting, even if he is bananas. so I tell him I’d like to hear it. off he goes:

O naany noony

the human race whines,

O naany noony

the human race pines.

they pine for their Zizas,

and they pine for their dough.

you could fill a whole ocean

with the things they don’t know.

“what do you think?” he’s quite serious. it seems important to him, what I think. I hate that brainless song, but what the heck can I say? “the song seems important to you.” I’m hoping he’ll say something sensible, like Yes.

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books novel silly science the Ziza

II. why I came into the cave

by braonthree

Page Ten

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The final heebie thing that happened was my broken engagement. Reese, my fiancé of three years, went away and didn’t come back. He’d been asking me for weeks to go to the judge and marry him. He thought we’d put it off long enough, and I see now that he was right. I loved Reese to pieces, but I just didn’t know if I could be a good wife. I didn’t think I was a very wifely person. I kept asking him if he didn’t think things were just fine the way they were, and he kept not liking me asking him that. In the end Reese gave me an ultimatum: Marry me tomorrow or it’s over.

I tried to marry him, I really did. I was telling the truth just now when I said I loved him to pieces. But when I was finally standing outside the door at the judge’s office, I simply couldn’t do it. I had too many questions rattling around in my brain. Questions about me. About life, and humanity. And as much as I adored Reese, I’d begun to get the naggy little idea that getting married, however the heck it had all started, had turned into just one more sort of silly human business.

While I was in the act of making a clean getaway from the judge’s office, Reese came out the door. He was pretty darned sad. But instead of crying and telling me how sad he was, instead of telling me how much I’d hurt him, my sweet Reesie began shouting mean things at me. Nasty things. He hated me I guess, all of a sudden. I ran off. I ran because he was being so mean. I wondered why it was that he just couldn’t show what he really was, which was hurt and sad. Why did he have to twist that hurtness and sadness into nasty yelling? At eight o’clock that morning he’d loved me. At ten the very same morning, he suddenly hated me. Yin yang, ebb and flow, peaks and valleys… see ya later.

Those last couple of months before I dropped out of mainstream human society were doozies, all right. And on top of it all I’d begun to form a stronger attachment to the Ziza fruit. I was discovering that I was a lot like my soft, longing, pleasure-loving mama. The things I had just didn’t fill me up.

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II. why I came into the cave

by braonthree

Page Eight

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I came into the cave because I didn’t know what else to do.

I was twenty-three years old. I was working in a large underwear factory that made thousands and thousands of jockstraps and brassieres. I was an underwear inspector, and I was a darned good one. I have a fine eye for detail, so it was my job to make sure that all the underwear stitching was securely done, and that all of it was in the right places. They paid me a fair wage for the work that I did, and most of my co-workers were nice people who were mostly pleasant to be with. Dickie and Titia’s is a pretty nice place to work.

But I was yearning for something more, though I didn’t know, and don’t know, what that something is. Day after day I fondled compartments for breasts and penises and testicles with a sharp eye for quality. At D and T’s they always let us inspectors take the rejects home, so after five years I had gathered myself a very respectable and colorful and fun collection of well-made personal garments. But they’re mostly useless to me. I don’t like brassieres and jockstraps, and never wear them. My brother and I had tried them all out with our friends when I was eleven, just for ha-ha’s. They were itchy and sticky and hot, and I didn’t like them.

I do wear panties and camisoles, so those are useful, but slips and all the other stuff hangs up or sits in a drawer looking pretty. And the older I got as I inspected underthings, the more it began to dawn on me that humanity had existed for an awfully long time in the cave-man days without any sort of undies at all, and no one seems to have been the worse for it. The Miralon Mutation is deadly, but going without understuff is just going without understuff. So I got more and more convinced that most underwear is just another one of humanity’s really silly ideas. And there it was: for five whole years of my one life I had earned my bread and butter by carefully fondling and inspecting someone’s silly, useless ideas.

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I. the world after miralon

by braonthree

Page Seven

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But not so much when it came to the Ziza. It was one thing, you know, to ask people to be cautious and sensible about things like rice and asparagus and pancakes. But it was quite a different kettle of fish asking them to be sensible about the pleasures of the sweet Ziza. When folks wanted to eat Zizas, they wanted them quick and they wanted lots. You could test every single fruit on a Ziza tree and maybe not find even one that was safe. Or you could go to the grocer’s and buy fifteen of them, and you might get six or seven that were safe, if it was a good day. And the amount of Zizas that were safe was never enough to satisfy the people who had got addicted to them. One each for breakfast, lunch, supper and bedtime (especially bedtime) was about the smallest number that Ziza-heads could get by on. Whole gangs of people started raising them. Little baby Ziza trees sprang up just about everywhere. Playgrounds, all around public buildings, backyards, and loads of other spots. The plain fact was that humanity just could not get enough unmutated Zizas.

So that’s why a lot of humans still died of the Miralon Mutation long after they stopped needing to, long after the test kits, long after eating anything at all had stopped being a crap shoot. People are still dying from it now. It’s too hard for people to keep waiting and waiting and looking and looking for untainted Zizas. They want to take the risk and eat all of them their bellies can hold. Death doesn’t seem to be much of a deterrent.

Especially death from mutated Zizas. Oh, you come down with the Drools all right, but you do it in the Seventh Heaven. The minute you feel sick, you also feel that funny protein hammering away at the pleasure center in your brain. You die drooling and moaning in pain, but at the same time you die moaning and sighing and purring with pleasure. Until you run out of breath and that’s that. It’s a very mixed-bag kind of thing. And a lot of people believe that since eventually we’re all going to die after 120 years or so anyway, why not risk it all on the Ziza draw and die in the Seventh Heaven.

And they make a darned good point, for sure.

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I. the world after miralon

by braonthree

Page Six

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The botanists were happy, of course, but they were also a bit flustered. They hadn’t expected such an overnight success, so they started running some more of those science-club tests on their new fruit. It turned out that the guavagranate was not only ultra-sweet and ultra-delicious, but it also contained a protein that stimulated the brain’s pleasure center in a very big way. And that’s why nobody’s called it the guavagranate since before I was born. Everybody calls it Ziza. On account of the way it makes you feel. Pretty wild and happy and excited. Like you just want to say the word Ziza over and over again until you fall over in a snooze and can’t say it anymore. It’s really something.

For a while the botanists wondered if they shouldn’t try to make a Ziza that wouldn’t make people want to yell Ziza, but that would have meant cheating their lab out of an awful lot of money. And since the funny little protein turned out to cause a sort of psychological addiction instead of an actual physical one, in the end they decided to leave the Ziza well enough alone. And in that way, of course, their lab hung on to those juicy little profits.

I bet you can guess what happened next. Yup, the Zizas began to mutate too. Not all of them, like the potatoes and the other things, but enough of them that eating one became a risky thing to do, a sort of Ziza roulette.

But there was help. Our pals in science clubs never leave us completely stranded. After the big Miralon Mutation they’d designed a little kit everybody could get to test their food before they ate it, to see if it was mutated. It was 100% accurate, and it was free. The government felt they ought to give these things out to people for no money since it was their fault the Miralon got sprayed all over the world in the first place. It was a neat little plan that got some folks liking the government again, at least a little. Most people tested their food, and people over the whole of Mother Earth began to stay alive at an alarming rate.

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I. the world after miralon

by braonthree

Page Four

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This time the scientists did what they hadn’t done the first time. This time they stop and go home when they found out the Australian lady’s potatoes were poisonous, no siree. Instead, they kept on testing until they found out why the spuds were deadly. And then they compared their stuff to all the stuff about Jimmy Johnson’s potatoes, and they had the answer. Everything was exactly the same. And the reason, by gum, that potatoes in Oklahoma and their cousin potatoes in Australia were turning up poisonous was Miralon.

Yup, it was Miralon, the erstwhile savior of humanity that had up and changed its little chemical mind and decided to kill us all off, one by one, spud by spud. It was causing some of fatso Mother Earth’s plants to mutate, and the mutation made the plant proteins so deadly that even cooking them didn’t help.

First it was spuds, and then peanuts, and then wheat, and it all just kept going. Not many people died right away after they ate the poisoned food. Most of them would be sick for a week, or three weeks, or even three months sometimes. The sickness was awful. It made people’s mouth glands salivate so much that their mouths couldn’t hold it all, and the extra spittle would come spilling out the sides. That’s why everyone started calling the sickness the Drools, even though it was really called Fatal Systemic Toxic Cell Destruction. There were lots of other symptoms that were a whole lot worse than the drooling, but I guess the sickness got its nickname so fast because the spittle was something you could see on the outside, while all the other nasty suffering happened on the inside.

My sweet-cute Papa was sixteen when Jimmy Johnson bit the big one. He and Mama told me and Gammo all about it when we were young. They showed us disks of all the news shows, and that’s how I know about Jimmy’s walking-dead Mama and the Aussie lady’s birthday bash. They also told us that the members of the hotsy-totsy science club named this vegetable roulette the Miralon Mutation. Nothing very fancy or hard to understand about that name. Right to the old point: Miralon was mutating plants, and at that moment the scientists didn’t know that every plant on earth would change, but in the end, they all did.

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I. the world after miralon

by braonthree

Page Three

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Two years went by. The plants produced and the people ate. Heaven was up (if you buy that sort of stuff), hell was down, and all was right with the world. Until one fine day, little Jimmy Johnson from someplace in Oklahoma, died. He died from a poisonous baked potato his Mama had fed him for supper three nights before. It took the the science people a while to figure it all out, but that’s what it was. Then they tested the rest of the potatoes left in his Mama’s bag and found out that some of them were deadly, and some of them weren’t. That’s how come nobody else in Jimmy’s family died: on the big roulette wheel of life, Jimmy was the only one at the table who’d spun the poisoned potato.

They showed his Papa on the computer show. I wish it was me, I wish it was me, he kept saying. His Mama stood there like the walking dead. Finally she told the interviewer (she talked like the walking dead too) to go fry his ass. She nobody out there knew how it felt to poison your baby when you were only trying to feed him a good supper so he’d grow up big and strong. Eat your potatoes, Jimmy, she’d told him, and you’ll grow up big and strong. He was a good boy. He did what I told him. Now he’s dead as a rat. Go fry your ass.

The world talked about Jimmy for a few days, and then it just went about its usual silly business for nine days more. New and improved fatso Mother Earth turned around and around without anybody caring too much about one poisoned potato and one dead boy.

And then somebody else died. Way over in Australia. A lady with ten kids ate homemade potato pancakes for breakfast one day and was dead a week later. She died on her fortieth birthday. They’d had her on the computer news that morning, right before she died. She was lying in the bed with tubes and machines, trying to smile for the camera, which seems to me like a stupid thing to do when you’re dying of potato pancakes. Anyway she tried to smile. Her family were all around her, wearing dopy party hats and hanging onto pink and yellow balloons that had Happy Birthday Mum written on them. A few hours later she was history. Her husband had grown those Aussie potatoes all by himself right there on their own Aussie land. All of a sudden, he had ten kids with no mother. And all of a sudden, little Jimmy J. from Oklahoma was big news again.

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I. the world after miralon

by braonthree

Page Two

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So my name is Hema, and I’m living in the world after Miralon. Miralon came along before I was born, while my Papa was a kid. In fact, the whole world was washed with Miralon only two years after my father’s happy tonsillectomy, which means that he was a lad of twelve at the time.

There was a very nasty food shortage in those days, and it was all over the planet. So the most la-di-da botanists and chemists from all over the world got together to form a sort of super-duper science club to come up with a way to make plants and trees produce more food. They made this club when Pa was a little shaver of five, but it took seven more years for them to have Miralon ready to spray. At the end of those seven years, they had it. Marvelous, magical Miralon. Miralon would make plants produce two to three times as much stuff as they really liked to produce. There would be more vegetables and fruits, more grains and nuts and what-have-you for everybody. And Miralon was safe. No plants or animals or people would get hurt. Humanity was happy. Miralon would save them all.

Little by little, the whole of big old plumpy Mother Earth was sprayed with the potion of the super-duper science club. The hungriest countries were the first ones to get doused, since that seemed like the fair thing to do. After that, all the other countries got their turns. Then everyone sat back and waited. Waited for reports to trickle into the main office of the super-duper science club. Reports about the rice harvests, and the soybean harvests, and all the other harvests of all the other edible plant stuff all over everywhere. And the news was hopping, flaming good: Miralon did make the plants produce a lot. A whole lot. And for a long time, things seemed just dandy.

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I. the world after miralon (1)

by braonthree

Page One

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I’m Hema. Gabbalin is the rest of my name, the second part. Hema Gabbalin, when you jam it all together. It’s an unusual name, I’ve been told, and I suppose that’s most likely true. At least I think it’s as true as anything can be.

I came to have this unusual name because my father is a man in love. His first love happened to him when he was ten years old and sitting on a doctor’s table, tapping at his little teeth with an antique wooden tongue depressor while the doctor talked away at my grandma. The doctor was telling her that Papa was definitely not going to get any healthier unless he had a tonsillectomy, which was a pretty ancient sort of procedure, but still the best thing for tonsils as junky as Papa’s were. And it was when he heard that monster of a word that my little dad fell head over heels in love with medical lingo for the rest of his days. Which, by the way, are still going on. He’s not dead.

By the time my brother and I came mewling and prune-wrinkled into this world, Papa had got himself a very large collection of medical books. Old ones, made out of paper and ink. He’d memorized nearly every monster-word in them, not giving a fig about the pictures or the diseases or the cures: he only had eyes for the words.

As a lucky perversion of fate would have it, he was already blessed (he says) with the second name Gabbalin, which could have come straight out of one of those paper medical books. With half of his love already in place, it was easy as pie for Papa to pick out our first names — even before we were born. Gammo for my brother, Hema for me. And how many times has our sweet-cute Papa told us how it thrills his heart to hear what he wrought. He says all the time that there’s nothing dearer to his ears than to hear some doctor-words echoed so charmingly in his children’s names. To the world we’re Gammo Gabbalin and Hema Gabbalin, but to Papa we will always stand for gamma globulin and hemaglobin, two of his real favorites. To know my Papa is truly to love him.

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the pygmies keep dancing

a silly book about silly human business

IIII. o naany noony (2)

II. why I came into the cave

II. why I came into the cave

I. the world after miralon

I. the world after miralon

I. the world after miralon

I. the world after miralon

I. the world after miralon

I. the world after miralon (1)

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