David Ohle - The Pisstown Chaos

His hands were beat-up, dirty, average size, somewhat simian, the fingers unusually short, the nails unusually long, thick and dirty. As if playing a tiny piano, these fingers moved in time to music only he could hear.

What was left of his hair was wild, dirty and knotted. His flesh, tinged yellow, had broken out in rashes and welts. There was dried vomit down the front of his filthy, terrycloth robe, which bore on the pocket the seal of the Reverend. And around the desk were the sometimes fresh, sometimes old and crusted, results of his unpredictable and incontinent "accidents." He sometimes stepped in them and tracked feces everywhere. If there was enough water, he bathed once a week.

An irreversible neurological syndrome caused by the prolonged drinking of Jake afflicted him. Its characteristic features were involuntary movements of the face and mouth and of the forehead, eyebrows, cheeks, legs and arms. He frowned, blinked and grimaced. He smiled, pouted, puckered and smacked his lips. He clenched his teeth, bit his lip, and his tongue protruded unnaturally.

He said to Roe one day, "I'm going to put up an artificial moon. My scientists tell me it can be done. It will be a medically significant moon, intended to cleanse the atmosphere of airborne bacilli for all time."

"Fascinating," Roe said.

"I've always thought the moon was the source of the parasites. By some little-understood means, they made their way here. That will be at the heart of my next sermon."

"Exciting and informative," Roe said.

"One more promise I'll make to the people. Jake will sell for a buck a bottle and be standardized. The quality will improve dramatically."

"Standards are what we live by, sir."

"I feel I need an enema, Roe. I feel full."

"I'll warm up the bathroom right away, sir, and get the enema bag ready."

Once Roe had firmly inserted the hose, the Reverent sat on the pot and closed his eyes. "There, that's it, Roe. It's in well enough."

"Shall I leave you alone now, sir?"

"No. Don't leave. Let me sermonize a little. I'll tell you a story, a story with a lesson. In the days when all men were good, they had miraculous power. Lions, mountains, whales, jellyfish, hagfish, birds, rocks, clouds, seas, moved quietly from place to place, just as men ordered them at their whim and fancy. But the human race at last lost its miraculous powers through the laziness of a single man. He was a woodman in the Fertile Crescent. One morning he went into the forest to cut firewood for his master's hearth. He sawed and split all day, until he had a considerable stack of hickory and oak. Then he stood before the pile and said, 'Now, march off home!' The great bundle of wood at once got up and began to walk, and the woodman tramped on behind it. But he was a very lazy man. Now, why shouldn't I ride instead of galloping along this dusty road, he said to himself, and jumped up on the bundle of wood as it was walking in front of him and sat down on top of it. As soon as he did, the wood refused to go. The woodman got angry and began to strike it fiercely with his axe, all in vain. Still the wood refused to go. And from that time the human race had lost its power."

"That certainly explains everything I've ever wondered about, sir."

"You may clean me now."

"Yes, sir."

A scant month after the renovations were finished and Hooker returned to the Templex, he decided that he could no longer be seen in public. "I'm going to be a different man from now on. I'll assume another identity, a more satisfying one. I'll step out of my self for a while as actors are known to do. Even my nervous tics may disappear. Perhaps that is the answer. I will take it under advisement."

"Would you like me to draw you a warm bath, sir?" Roe asked that evening.

"Yes, and get me some willy and a Jake. Nothing warms me better."

"Only Jake, sir. That's all they're letting you have. No more willy."

Hooker lay in the warm tub for hours, drinking Jake and thinking up new policies, while Roe sat on the closed commode playing the saw and occasionally taking up a notepad and pencil.

"Take this down," Hooker said, sloshing Jake in his mouth. "I'm afraid if we send up a medical moon it will be too magnetic, that it will lift junk from junkyards."

"Got it, sir. Shall I soap your back?"

"Oh yes, by all means."

Roe knelt beside the tub and applied floating soap to a sponge. "Shall I go ahead and lance these boils while I'm at it?"

"Leave them alone. They come and go. It's not a bother. I like them."

"Yes, sir."

"I don't think I'm long for this office, Roe. I've lost control. Was it the shifting programs?"

"I think they're a shining success, sir. Look at me. Would I have been here with you otherwise?"

"Roe, boy," Hooker said one day, "You're as close to everyman as any man I've ever known. That's why I try out my ideas on you first."

"I'm honored, sir."

"Without periodic Chaos, a society like ours would surely fall into a slump. Don't you agree?"

"There's no doubt about it."

"I'm soon going to propose a five-year moratorium on all productive activity. We shut down the factories, we board up the banks. Commerce grinds to a halt. And out of all the resulting Chaos and suffering, maybe we'll come to some kind of agreement as to what's worth doing and what's not. I give you the example of the legendary old boll weevil. Any cotton farmer could have told you, the best way to get rid of weevils was to stop growing cotton for a few years."

"Solid logic, sir," Roe said, "almost geometrical in its simplicity. That's the kind of idea that can't be denied or aborted. I've got goose-bumps, frankly. I've heard of cotton, but I don't know much about it. I do know that my grandmother has a dress made of it. She showed it to me once. It was soft to the touch."

A month later, in the middle of an icy January, during a night of fitful sleep, Hooker encountered what he claimed was the ghost of a stinker. The frightening stranger was discovered in a clothes closet when Hooker decided he needed warmer bed clothes. Reaching in for his woolen pajamas, his fingers glided across a grizzled cheek and he nearly collapsed. He tried to call out for help but his voice box was paralyzed. As in a nightmare, his mouth merely shaped itself around the words but he couldn't speak them.

"Don't be afraid," the stinker said. "I'm Joseph Lovell, builder and owner of the building. I've lived here two hundred years tomorrow. I don't know where in the building I stay. It's a dim, damp place, perhaps the cellar. I don't know how I got into your closet. I may have been there for a decade. How would I know?"

Hooker closed the closet door and heard no more from Lovell the rest of the night and in the morning related the episode to Roe. "I tingled after meeting this Mr. Lovell. I'm still tingling all over. Like a mild current running under the skin. It's maddening."

In the days after Lovell's first appearance, Hooker's condition worsened. He didn't trust the ice they brought him from the kitchen. He suspected the staff of putting chemicals in the water. Arsenic, he thought, would explain why his stomach boiled like a vat of acid without relief, and why he was acquiring a greenish glow.

Roe recommended that an aquarium be placed in Hooker's oval office, filled with seaweed, urchins, a bubbling diver and a baby hagfish. It was an effort to keep him amused and therefore calm. But once the aquarium was installed, no further attention was paid to it. The water dried up and all the creatures died while Hooker watched with intermittent attention.

On a nocturnal visit to Hooker's bedroom, after using the toilet, Lovell said, "Excuse me, but the bowels of ghosts do move, despite the popular notion to the contrary, rather frequently as a matter of fact. But what's produced is just a squirt of ectoplasm and a little gas."