David Ohle: The Pisstown Chaos

Victims of the Pisstown parasite were thought of as dead, but not enough to bury. Gray haggard, poorly dressed, they lay in gutters, sat rigidly on public benches, floated along canals and drank from rain-filled gutters. City Moon, the Pisstown paper, dubbed them "stinkers. "Had you walked through Hooker Park, where groups of them congregated you would have been wise to hold your breath as long as possible. In the end stage of the parasite's devastation, the body decomposed rapidly starting with the belly. By then internal organs had begun to dissolve. Had you been sitting next to a fourth-stage stinker, perhaps on a pedal bus, when the parasite finished its work, and you didn't move quickly enough, the poor creature might have spattered cadaverine all over your clothing. And the eye-watering odor would never have washed out, not afar a million launderings. Despite these sufferings, complete death for stinkers was long in coming, sometimes taking the better part of a lifetime.

Those in the third stage of the infestation often fall into lives of murder and mayhem. In Pisstown, two of them recently asked Reverend Hooker for a starch bar, and on being refused set upon him with jackknives, leaving him with a bloodied face and a nicked ear. Then they stopped at the home of Peter Gramlich, a prominent wig, and asked at his back window for crusts, for urpmilk, for a lump of willywhack or an old sock full of urpseed meal, for whatever could be spared. When Gramlich denied them anything, they were on him in a moment, cutting him to death with their knives, burning the wood, frame cottage to a mound of cinder with Gramlich inside.

This week we celebrate Reverend Hooker's sixtieth birthday Now, more and more facts have come to light about the American Divine: anyone who stepped on his shadow was given what he called a damned Russian punishment. "He had one of his aspirants put to death by garrote because he "looked like a pinhead. " He forbade his pedalers to make left-hand turns and called the left-hand seat of the vehicle behind the pedaler "the death seat" and never sat there. He once bought a sparrow dyed yellow from a grifting stinker who told him it was a canary. He liked to turn his eyelids inside-out and look at himself in the mirror. His overstimulated immune system contributed to psoriatic breakouts that showed themselves in pulsing red patches, some the size of playing cards. They occurred on his face, chest, legs, arms, and once or twice on the penis and scrotum. The patches came and went with time. When one vanished in a shower of white flakes, another sprouted somewhere else. Like clouds, they showed a variety of contours. Sometimes the Reverend could see a face in them. He named them and spoke to them in hushed tones. There are those who have reported seeing the Reverend on downtown pedal buses, whiskery, uncommunicative, aphasic, intoxicated, tugging at his hair, foaming at the mouth, in rumpled clothing, unable to remember his name.

The departure of a female imp from one of the Heritage Area's most popular parks has left residents in a state of sadness. For the past five years, the imp had been living beside the brackish waters of a small lagoon in Hooker Park, and its presence inspired a devoted following. It was often spotted swimming along the lagoon's edges, munching grass on its banks. In winter, when the grass was gone, it ate the protein-rich scum, spirulina, which floated in foaming islands on the lagoon six months of the year. The imp dragged the scum ashore with its webbed feet, then patted it into little biscuits and let them dry in the sun.

Last month, in a daylong journeys the imp swam across the lagoon, down a canal and into the Bum Bay Straits. The Reverend's Divine Guard, fearful the animal would wander into ship traffic or be drawn away in an undertow made a successful effort to net her from a barge. Fearful she could wander again into harm's way the Guard resolved not to return her to the lagoon, releasing her instead on the Reverend's Square Island Research and Development Farm. She's a perfect specimen," said Hooker, who had glimpsed the imp twice at the lagoon. "She must be saved for research and development. "

In keeping with the Reverend's expressed wish, the prison facility on Permanganate Island will soon stand aside as the Island' primaryfeature. Now, a complex of buildings has been constructed near the Island's eastern shore, far from the prison itself devoted entirely to parasite eradication research. A group of the Reverend's researchers has declared its intention to live on the Island and to study the mysterious parasite until the puzzle of its life cycle is solved.

An incident that took place more than a year ago was reported in today's City Moon. At 12:30 in the morning two Pisstown residents were pedaling down Dunvant Road when the paving stones collapsed beneath them into a pit nearly thirty feet deep. As they struggled to climb out of the subsidence, the two were asphyxiated by a mixture of carbolic and cadaverine gases rising from the disturbed ground. After the vapors had dissipated, curious townfolk began digging deeper, looking fir the source of the horrific odor escaping the hole. In alh seventeen stinkers were found and, from them, over five hundred teeth extracted, yielding a hefty half-pound of tooth gold.

The stinkers were stacked in a field near the edge of the City. It was supposed that in time, wind, sun, rain and vermin would turn them into dust. But a night watchman at the Palace Orienta, passing the field on his way to work, saw imps feeding on the remains and became alarmed. When he went to the Guard office and reported what he had seen, he was informed that others had filed similar reports, of imps favoring flesh over grass. The Guards had no explanation for the sudden change in feeding habits.

When the first shifting programs were enacted decades earlier, Mildred Balls, known then as Mildred Vink, was a young woman of twenty-five. Hundreds of thousands of shiftees were on the move in those days, headed for new mates, jobs and living quarters. Shifting orders arrived in the mail without forewarning and relocation assignments had to be carried out within days, sometimes hours.

One of those in transition at the time, Jacob Balls, had made a living selling Jake powder in cities, settlements and bailiwicks until he was shifted to the waiting camp at Witchy Toe. He had a light-bodied, fast moving pedal coupe and had called on customers over a wide territory. The finely-grained, yellow-tinged powder was of his own invention. In the trunk were gallon tins of it. The powder, when stirred into water or urpmilk, produced an intoxicating beverage. Thus far all his patent and subvention applications had been denied, but he was confident of one day seeing Jake in every tavern, restaurant and home.

Mildred Vink stood on the roadside in the hot sun as Jacob's coupe came into view. She raised the leg of her rags to the knee, a common way for hitchhikers to advertise their pedaling potential. While she was generally slender in body, her calf muscles were crisply defined and heavily developed. There were two sets of pedals in the coupe, and two pairs of strong legs made traveling at a good clip that much easier.

Jacob glided to a stop. "Where you headed?"

"The waiting camp at Witchy Toe. I've been shifted."

"Put your bag in the trunk. I'm going to the camp, too. That's quite a set of legs you have. They could support a piano."

Mildred opened the trunk, placed her small bag between boxes of Jake powder, and stepped up into the passenger seat.

"Can you imagine," she said, "they're sending me to live in a trailer and mate with a man I've never met." She patted a circle of sun blisters on her throat with a medicated sachet and strapped her feet into the passenger's pedals.