Friday nights are largely the same for us. Stumbling through the same clubs and piss niches, using tired, formulas to calibrate the near ideal, near identical high with the same drugs. Same expectations of music, strange experiences, beautiful women. Same dude who pulls a blunt from his sock and offers you a hit. The night leaving you warm, but knowing the same journey home will make you cold. Same realization you were cold to start with. Same. So when we left that night in search of another cooler, more happening, less throwing-my-friend-out-for-being-too-drunk club I felt the same as I always did.
Mark had met some girl that night. Met is a strong word. He had fallen into her unlocked bathroom stall and then they started making out on the checkered floor. That is an unbreakable bond and tonight they were proving that the power of love could topple mountains, specifically the mountains of utter incoherence and lack of motor skills. They have some beautiful vistas, by the way. The girl, Mona, complained of a raging drunk hunger and Mark championed her cause. He rallied us all, Cutler, Tobias, Jill, Mona, and myself, to an intersection with three bodegas, one on each corner. After much debate, It was decided that the bodega on the South East corner was the best for its better chip selection and rumors of having Orangina.
We pilfered the store for our respective snack fantasies. Tobias seethed at the owner for not having Nerds Rope. He tried to suggest other rope like candy options to my friend to no avail. "Cowtails?! You fucking animal!" Loaded with several bags of chips I stared into the drink freezer. An Orangina shaped silhouette waited in its depths. I opened the door and reached into the blackness, only to have it snatched away. A dark figure had been waiting and bolted with my bottle. Were I in anyway sober, I might have been more disturbed by this, but instead I felt the all too familiar drunk rage of a toddler. I threw my money on the counter and stormed outside to wait for my friends.
Alternating fistfuls of different chips, I noticed something new and strange. Outside the bodega was one of those quarter rides for children, a sort of miniature mechanical bull but without the whale tails and puke stained safety cushions that accompany it in a bar setting. Upon closer inspection, it was not a bull at all but a duck. A white feathered, yellow billed duck wearing a colonial three cornered hat. I mused at this choice. Why such a blatant and peculiar anachronism? Perhaps it was a cast-off from a Crucible themed amusement park? I did not know and was further overcome by a sense that I had been unPC. What if the hat was part of the duck's cultural heritage? No doubt he had been oppressed in his life. I would never be able to understand his hardships. Ohh god, I was assuming the duck was a man. Better just to apologize and shut the fuck up.
My friends poured out of the bodega and interrupted me saying "please don't post this on tumblr." Perplexed at my contrition to this mechanical beast, they stood around me blinking. Artfully I played it off like I was mad at the ride for stealing my money. Mark, ever the champion of people's whims, insisted he would make the duck pay. "Either you're getting a ride out of this thing or I'm going to bore a hole into it so you can fuck it." I told him to leave the duck alone, that it had had enough mistreatment for one night, but Mark was not one to be dissuaded. Tobias, Jill, Mona, and Cutler applauded as Matt mounted the machine and kicked it's flanks as if it were a horse. The duck resisted his advances. Then he resorted to pecuniary lubrication, dropping a quarter into the change slot. The duck acknowledged the transaction with a piercing jingle, a tune somewhere between obnoxious door bell and a child's shriek or laugh (it's really impossible to tell between the two).
Either baby crazy from the sound or jealous that the duck was taking her man's attention, Mona bounded over to the machine and jumped on clutching Mark's barrel chest for balance. In turn, the machine began to rock slowly back and forth. "This is worse than fucking a fat guy" Mona blurted. "Hey!" an obviously body conscious Mark responded. The pace of the duck's swaying quickened and a strange color emanated from the ride. A brownish almost areola like aura billowed out from the head of the duck and quickly encapsulated the lovers. Before the rest of us could react the aura morphed from transparent to opaque, in effect creating a spherical nipple around our friends and the ride. We rushed over to the pyramid and pounded it's dense, yet fleshy exterior. Cutler recoiled from the tactile sensation. Jill, barred the fuck out from enough Xanax to quell a Walmart shopping riot, hugged the pyramid and pressed her face into it. The equivocating effete that I am alternated between throwing ineffectual punches and hurling lame jokes at it. "You call yourself a pyramid?!" I had no idea where I was going with that one. The pyramid began to quiver violently and then collapsed in upon itself, shrinking to a tiny dot and vanishing all together. My friends were gone. The machine remained. Duckus ex machina.
Aghast by the disappearance, we encircled the machine and prodded it as if it were a dead body. Nothing happened. It starred back at us with it's black, bread-lusting eyes. Tobias enjoined us to panic and wild speculation. Was it some kind of sentient entity with charnel machinations for its riders? Perhaps it was a gateway to another world? Mark had always been a bit off, what if he were some kind of magician? What if we were all just THAT fucked up and they had slipped away unnoticed to bone? There was only one way to know. Someone had to ride that dastardly duck and hard. I volunteered. I had always had a thing for ducks from Daffy to Donald and Darkwing. I also had the least to live for. I gave a eulogy for myself and parceled out my belongings to the attending host. Cutler would get my cat. Jill my prized Emperor VHS, a rare black metal relic. Tobias would get my books and Steam account. Burn everything else. Doing my best John Wayne impersonation I saddled up the duck and moseyed on to a near certain death, my chips still in hand.
Pocket. Quarter. Slot. Slide. Clink. The duck swayed forward and back. The tune played. I laughed. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe I wasn't about to be obliterated. Also, how could anyone enjoy this ride? "Kids suck!" I affirmed to my friends before being swallowed up by the large brown triangle. The interior was filled with a sour fluid and I big gulped a lung full trying to breath. I reached out to my friends, but the shape turned fully opaque. Floating up to the middle of the pyramid off the saddle of the duck, I thought about the Orangina and the girl who I had tried to dance with that night. I thought I was polite, but she was obviously very creeped out. It was probably for the best that I was drowning in this brown sauce. Flush the pain away. The pyramid began to shrink and the pressure was unbearable. I blacked out.
I awoke in a field tilled by war. Robotic and organic limbs rose up from the soil intertwined like grape vines. Enough to supply every sorority house in America with a years worth of Franzia. Probably a red vintage, but what do I know. I sat and surveyed the slaughter noshing on my chips. The horizon flashed with strange neon colors and the earth shook. I marched among the dead, following the waning light of the horizon. Out of the carnage rang a husky death rattle and I paused to find its source. There heaped among the bodies was Mona, though much older, more robotic, and gored up than I remembered. "You look better without all that blush on your lower intestine" I said. She laughed. "Where the fuck am I, by the way?". Blood dribbled from the side of her mouth. "Of course. How rude of me." I offered her my chips, but she declined with a shake of her hand. "We're on Trewegttie. A planet in another dimension that has been ravaged by war since time immemorial." I gasped. I had eaten all my chips.
"Where's Mark?" I asked foolishly. Mona chocked back a tear. "Those bastards, they killed him. We've been fighting against them for years. He was the love of my life." I knelt down and held her hand. She smiled back at me. "You must avenge us!" I cringed. "Uhhh, I hardly know you and Mark's more of an acquaintance than a friend. I would feel a bit uncomfortable avenging y'all. I could give a solid eulogy, though. Also, do you know a way out of here?" Mona laughed like I was complete fool. "Don't you see! They brought us here. They won't just let you go back." Now I was the one doing the laughing. "Listen," I said "I can entertain your whole we're on a different planet theory simply because I'm standing on what appears to be cyberpunk Gettysburg. I mean, there's a gigantic robotic arm crawling across the battlefield and strangling anyone left alive. It's plausible. I'll bite. But what fucking purpose could they have for me?" She looked at me like an old girlfriend who thought my idiocy was cute. "The Orangina. That's how they lure people. They want us to end this forever war."
I started laughing hysterically, loud enough that a dying woman asked me to keep it the fuck down. I gazed at Mona. "Okay so they need a 130 lbs. white dude with a bald spot and several moles he really needs to get checked out to end this conflict for them? Maybe there's a reason why these people have been at war for so long. I mean, if their solution to the problem is importing turds (me) not much is going to change." "Regardless, you are here now. There's no going back." I kicked at the dirt like a grumpy toddler. "Well, what the fuck should I do now?" Mona reached into a satchel by her side. She groaned from the pain and picked out a small cube. With flat palm she offered it to me. "Take this. It will tell you about the land. Find a woman named Ftupled. She is a leader here. Tell her you are from our dimension and that you know me." I took the cube. "Cool. Thanks. I guess I'll get out of your hair now." Mona howled in pain. "Wait! Do this one last thing for me." She pointed to her bag. "There is a small disc within. Give it to me." I hesitated. "You just like a second ago reached into that very same bag yourself." "Fuck you! I'm dying!"
"Alright fine." I walked over and pulled the disc from the bag. I handed it to her. "Now go. End this senseless violence." Mona aligned the disc with a small slot on her cybernetic leg. It slid in. She convulsed, almost resonated, for several seconds before collapsing into death.
Armed with a small geometric shape and a total ignorance of everything around me, I continued my journey across the gory moors. After sometime I noticed a man walking in the distance. He seemed to be scavenging the battle fields, stopping every now and then to bend down. Without knowing where I was supposed to go and having lived a year among the freegans, I decided to approach. The man did not stop his search, even though I stood within fifty feet of him. He wore long blue robes and large metallic backpack he sported with only one strap on, the cool kid way. I watched as he stooped down and attached a cable to a robotic head lying on the ground. The head moaned in a creepy way and then powered down. I was disconcerted to say the least. "Did you just make that robot cum?" I asked. "If by cumming you mean transferring his intelligence into a hard drive, then yes?" Good lord, for all intents and purposes this man was a pretentious, LARPing, peripatetic hooker with a robot fetish and a savior complex. This world deserved to burn. I waved goodbye and spun on my heel to leave, but he ran after me. "Excuse me. I can't help but notice that you seem to be a little lost." I admitted that I probably couldn't be more disoriented even if I were butt chugging LSD. He laughed and told me I reminded him of a certain journalist in his world's history who was known for taking copious amounts of drugs. Flattered by these visions of Hunter S. Thompson, I agreed to follow this man wherever he may go.
Coincidentally, this was the right choice. Dch, the man who was leading me, was a robo healer traveling around this war torn land and helping sentient machines fix themselves. He told me an anecdote about a woebegone android to whom he suggested the philosopher Klaaat (apparently this world's equivalent of Kierkegaard). Turns out ceaseless war is bad for morale and almost everyone on this world is depressed about it. He spoke of this world's history. How there were two major schools of thought about how the war began. One side proposed that a lusty cam boy pitted two world leaders against one another in a game of one-upmanship that eventually turned violent. The other stated that it was a candy pop music video shoot gone wrong behind all of this. I didn't know what to think, nor did I really care, but the preponderance of discarded lollipop sticks made me think those candy pop folks were on to something. Following several days of hiking we made it to the border of a bombed out metropolis.
Dch brought me to the headquarters of Ftupled within the city. I was led through by a minor procession befitting of a popular local radio talk show host. Ftupled held her court in a large pool which I prostrated before. I told her my story, about the duck, Mona, Dch, and I gave her the cube. The room erupted in hushed yet feverish speculation. Ftupled raised her arm and her court went silent. "So, stranger, can you help us? Have you a way to end this war?" I stroked my chin vigorously. "Well, I've got a couple of ideas." I pulled out a notepad I had been keeping and opened it up. "Would it be possible to kill all of them? I mean win." The room hissed and booed. Ftupled shook her head. "It is a stalemate. No side has enjoyed a meaningful advantage in hundreds of years." I crossed off "win the war" from my list. "Okay, well how about peace?" Everyone in the room looked around quizzically at one another. "You know, not fighting." Ftupled stood up from the pool and approached me with a solemn saunter. Taking my head in her hands she pulled my face into her breasts and kissed the top of my forehead. Her court began crying and cheering. I wrested my self from the motor boating/water boarding and gasped for breath. I gazed at my notebook and put a check mark next to "peace". Sirens and exclamations of joy could be heard resounding through the city. "Fucking idiots" I whispered under my breath.
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