(tbh)

The Talking Heads Story

A charismatic, well-dressed man walks into a reasonably upscale hotel, over a hundred dollars a night, but not two hundred. He asks to book a room until the 15th. The lovely teen manning the front desk cheerfully asks the man if his trip is for “business or pleasure”, to which the man doggedly replies “I see no difference between the two”, strangling the conversation in its crib before it has time to grow awkward, or unpleasant. The teen silently hands him a room card, and he heads upstairs, room 213. He swipes his card on the door handle and walks in, finding a young man’s dead body on the ground. Well, maybe he’s young. About five foot even by his estimation (which is pretty good), why, these days you could find grown corporate business men that height! tycoons, barons, and et cetera! “What a wonderful world we’ve created for ourselves,” the man thinks to himself, as he screams. He stops screaming. That won’t help any. Right now, what he wants more than anything is information. He presumes that the still, humanlike thing under a sheet is a dead body, and he assumes from his own glum, phallocentric worldview that this body at least at one point identified as male, but the great plethora of modern alternatives occur to him at once. He approaches the form and is met by a putrid stench, pulling the sheet back a bit further revealing greasy, bloodstained hair. He figures, at this point, that he’s gathered enough evidence, and elects to head back to the front desk, to make it the teen’s problem instead.

He gets to the front desk and informs the teen of the body. “Whaaaaaat??”, the teen asks exaggeratedly, to which the man reiterates that, “Yes, finding him was very traumatic for me and I would appreciate it if you or someone under you would remove it before I go back to the room.” The teen looks around as if he’s holding in a joke, and says, “We’ll get right on that. You can head back to your room in thirty. Sorry for any inconvenience.” The man lightens his furrowed brow and rereads the Nine Inch Nails autobiography in the courtyard, giving the teen a courtesy extra 5 minutes on top of the 30 he had asked for, partially of kindness and partially of becoming engrossed in the truly grotesque imagery, of Trent. The man goes back to his room, swipes the key, and finds another dead body, of similar height and build to the teen, under an identical sheet right next to the pre-existing dead body, which had not been moved or altered. He pulls open the second sheet fearing the worst, and finds the teen with a face frozen in a look of sheer terror. the teen bellows, “Ahhh!-ahh…-ha-ha!”, breaking into a Muntzian laugh at the sheer motherfucker before him. At this, the man begins blowing hot air from his nostrils, glowing red like the bull. “Has this whole damn thing been one big joke at my expense?!”, he asks the teen, believably, to which the teen unfazedly breaks out of his laughter to say, “No, just that part. We should probably get rid of this dead body. Will you help me carry it down the stairs?” The man, at a loss, does as the teen asks, and the two of them carry the body out of the hotel.

The man is at first afraid that someone might notice the three of them, but finds that most people don’t really care. The hotel has a cosmopolitan, carefree atmosphere, and most people are too busy working or relaxing to notice. Those that do seem to appreciate the greyer areas of human morality, coyly putting fingers to their lips, winking, expressing not quite support, but a tacit empathy. The most that the three have to deal with is a stern glare from a persnickety dyed-hair woman, which amounts to no tangible confrontation or difficulty. Once they are outside, the man asks the teen, “Where do we go now?”, to which the teen replies “Uhh… do you have a car, or, uh… Venmo?” Luckily for the trio, the man’s car is immaculate, and parked very proximately. The teen opens the door.

“Wow, this is immaculate,” says the teen. “Smells like saffron.”

“Yeah, you know, I work hard, and I like my vehicle to reflect that”, says the man, who is a bit worried that the stench of death might overpower his carefully cultivated aromatic signature. “Let’s rock and roll. Where are we headed?” the teen replies “Oh, I’ve got a friend in the bog who might be able to help us out a little bit. Just take the highway to Exit 88, and then I’ll tell you what to do.” This, to the man, is a little annoying. He has a lot planned for the day, and having to fit this in will strain some of it. They are currently at exit 97, which means that this drive will take at least 45 minutes, both ways. The man is pretty sure that neither of his passengers will be supplying gas money, but he was always a bit “socially awkward”, generally having a hard time telling people no. Besides, they were only a couple minutes away from the exit. As they pull toward the on ramp, the teen spots a hitchhiker, noticing his particularly wet grime and steely glare, and takes him to be a bog-man. Figuring the reward outweighs the risk, he rolls down the window as the car comes to a halt at the yield sign, shouting, “Hey asshole! Bog much?” The hitchhiker nods fitfully, and before the man can voice any concern the hitchhiker hops into the seat opposite the dead body.

“Big and tall, thank you all,” says the hitchhiker, “I’ve had my thumb out an hour now and you lot are the first to even notice me. What brings us to the bog?” The teen eagerly replies, “Oh, you know, this summer I’m working an unpaid internship as a bellhop. Do you live out there?” The hitchhiker alludes that he does with a wide-eyed look of realization, but cuts himself off before he can say anything interesting and begins listening to something that sort of resembles downtempo tv static, through BlueTooth headphones that no one noticed until they begin screeching, at a moderate volume to those in the front and surely deafeningly to those with ears full of them. The hitchhiker is out of communication, about as still as his seatmate, who he gave a mild half-greeting to on entry and no further consideration. The teen turns to the man. “Alright, now we’re alone. If you want to touch base, now would be the time.” The man thinks of the knowns and unknowns of the situation. This teen seems, in the grand scheme of things, not very knowledgeable. “What useful information could he really offer?”, the man wonders. He decides to give the teen a test, to see if his hypothesis is correct. “Who is the current house minority leader?” A perfect question, in the man’s eyes, one that correlates immediately to one’s degree of deference toward society. The teen, as the man suspected, gives a very wrong answer. The man isn’t even sure who “Gucci Mane” is supposed to be, but he doesn’t sound like any politician he’s ever heard of. The man smiles smugly, now bearing proof of the extent of his knowledge advantage over the teen. He decides to play his favorite podcast instead, as surely a pleasant, reasonable conversation could be heard in his car, even if it isn’t being physically had within it. He had been listening to the podcast earlier that day, so playing it now is as simple as pressing a button! He taps the play button on his car stereo, and without even touching his phone the machine whirrs to life.

“Hi everyone, welcome to Talking Points, i’m your host Katie-”

“Oh, banger, dude, this podcast smacks COCK, dude,” says the teen, rambunctiously. The man is concerned. “Is this the one where they talk about Bernie? You know I’m into that.” The man frantically switches to the radio, knocking shit over and making a mess of the console, a collection of actions in response to which the teen says, “You’ve gotta go back man. I’ve gotta know whether or not I need to vote this time.” The man suddenly feels as if he is being held hostage. Here he is, watching the podcast he loves get trampled upon by a troglodyte. He had initially put it on, so he can’t turn back now. He doesn’t want the teen to not vote, obviously. To encourage that even tacitly would be tantamount to getting a pro-fascism bumper sticker, which went against every fiber of the man’s being. Moreover, what if not playing the podcast offended the teen? Does he even care if he offends the teen? The man lingers on this bout of anxiety for the rest of the drive as he begins to be lulled into a manic highway hypnosis.

As they approach their exit, the man taps the hitchhiker, snapping him out of an induced, frenzied rage. The hitchhiker opens a window and tosses the closest object to him, in this case a lightly used book of sudoku puzzles, out onto the road.

“Yeet!”, he announces.

The man grimaces, as if he’s sniffing manure, and says, “Where do you want me to let you off?”

The hitchhiker replies “Uhhhh… here” and does a tuck and roll maneuver out of the car as it blasts down the off ramp around 45 miles per hour. The man screeches to a halt, gets up out of the car, and shouts “Are you okay?!” The hitchhiker, at this point, had already gotten up and begun to approach the nearest house, a brutalist, experimentally designed home with a six car garage and hundreds of Ring doorbells. He knocks on the door and is immediately enveloped in a group hug with twelve or thirteen dudes that look just like him. The man, who’s seen all of this, smiles a soft smile, and gets back into his car, which is now causing a line of, at this point, maybe 50 cars to form on the off-ramp. “Did he make out alright?”, asks the teen, making a deeply flawed attempt at “Bambi eyes.” The man hugs the teen very tenderly, and says “I think so, sunshine. I think so.” The teen wrestles his way out and sprays himself silly with some sort of disinfectant spray, and petulantly gives the man the “silent treatment” for a moment.

“So which part of the bog are we going to?”, asks the man, cutting off the teen’s attempt at the silent treatment far before it could be remotely construed as offensive. “Ah, just, uh, take the next right. After this one- Chateau Drive. That’s it. Then in five minutes you can turn onto her street.” This makes sense to the man. He was always good at following instructions. Despite the teen’s rebuff, the man feels rejuvenated at the hitchhiker’s good fortune. The podcast has ended, a very short one at only 30 minutes, and he is finally let to sit in silence. He looks around at the lush greenery. There’s something devastatingly beautiful about a bog; the man is truly entranced. He imagines what it must be like at night here. Why, this far out from the city you could see some serious stars! He imagines himself retired here, one day, blearily gaming the days away with the knowledge that he had earned it. Ah yes. Once a year, on Thanksgiving, which was always the man’s favorite holiday, his entire family line, massive in both numbers and physical size, would come down to his pleasant, yet gigantic bog-side cottage. He’d prepare an entire cow, several sides, perhaps even a salad. The family, right here, on a back-yard patio table, would eat a meal so opulent that his imagination struggled to fully capture it. They’d play in the yard, which would be messy, but he would always make sure to keep a pack of wet wipes around, for the kids. This fantasy, for the man, is serene, and he could spend another hour in it, but his turn is coming up.

“Here, right here!”, says the teen, a little too late, forcing the man to violently swerve onto what seems to be a one lane road. They putt-putt along for about 45 more seconds, and come upon a revolting hut. The teen eagerly gets out of the car before the man, waiting by his door impatiently, and then the two grab the body and bring it to the door. The man utilizes the decrepit door knocker, giving two powerful and three dull knocks, before the door swings open, and the two are greeted by a very well-dressed, somewhat alternative woman in her 50s.

She dryly looks over the body, and states with a smirk that “I don’t suppose you acquired this one the same way as the others.” The teen makes a slight shrug motion, but the woman doesn’t seem to notice it or care, as she suddenly lifts the body up out of the man and teen’s hands, deft, as if it were made of styrofoam or some other very light material. She has a wall-sized machine in her kitchen that sort of resembles an upside down french press, with a wide control panel that seemed quite well worn.

“What type of cash are you holding?”, asks the woman, to which the teen eagerly removes 31 crumpled-up dollars in fives and ones from his wallet. “I’m not looking for anything fancy unless he’s looking to throw in”, says the teen, as he again tries a variant of “Bambi eyes” that more than anything communicates a sort of looming, psychedelic fear. This look, while evocative, doesn’t move the man where it matters (his wallet), and the woman snatches the $31 out of the teen’s lightly-sticky hands. “I’ll give it a bath, too, for that extra dollar,” says the woman, as she sets to work tossing, literally tossing, the body into the machine and banging out a hypnotic little rhythm on the control panel, a fiendish, jazzy little thing, reminiscent of the base melody of “Superstition”. This is the first time that the man actually sees the full extent of the body, and, despite it being very traumatic and scary, the man can’t help but notice how similar the body is in appearance to the teen. They have sort of similar facial structures, similar complexions and haircuts, and oddly enough, the same exact outfit, a get-up similar to a color-reversed Fred from Scooby Doo, black collared shirt with a yellow collar and pants, fucking massive green ascot. The only noticeable difference, outside of the teen appears alive, is that the body appears to have incurred a massive sum of age. The body does not remain in one piece for very long, as it soon begins spinning around rapidly, jolted and torn apart with each note of the woman’s song. In the larger, bottom portion of the machine, a large nozzle begins squirting out some of the dark reddish body-fluid, a more viscous blood, if you will, into a clear mold which, as it begins to fill, seems to resemble how the man would assume the body looked at its peak. At the instant the mold fills, the machine beeps a satisfied beep, and immediately does a massive blast of water, banging the new body all up out and over the thing like a god-damned crash test dummy. There comes a second, similar beep, and the machine door opens, to a new body, somehow wearing clothes now. This is not the same get-up as earlier, but rather an obnoxious, “streetwear” look with a neon, simplistic color scheme and no text except for across his headband, which reads “lifestyle.”

The body walks out and does a cheery little jig, singing “eh-de-de, eh-youde-de, eh-dedededede-de-dede.”

The teen gives a muted cheer, says “Nice fit!”, and the woman looks on with a reserved smile, golf clapping.

The refreshed body theatrically straightens itself up, still quite short even after this process gave it a couple of inches, and says, “Well now that we’ve gotten through all that what-what pleasantries all, surely lot-lot satisfied with me ready to “LUNGE”, it pretends to stab itself through with a knife and fall softly to the ground, “Lunge through me and release me from this, this… wretched mortal coil, why, whatsit, why, FUCK ME UP!!” The others stand around the body as it lays on the ground, tongue splayed out and body curled up imitating a dead rat. “Send me back down there, yeeaaah, send me back down,” it says, relatively reservedly.

The man, perturbed, hollers “Why, do it yourself you lazy dope!” At this point, he had done one too many favors for the day.

“Oh, ha ha, oh. Nice attitude, but that’s not gonna happen.” began the woman, as she pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Any homunculaic process is gonna include a chemical anti-suicide failsafe. Aside from the mandrake and moldy ergot rye, oy, that’s the most essential thing, no, that’s not gonna happen.”

The man understands, nodding and then asking, “Well, what do you expect him to do then, if he can’t kill himself?”

The woman looks at the man, then through him, making him forget the question and nervously start looking at his phone. There were no notifications, but if he slid up he was able to look at the various alerts and messages that had accumulated since he’d last taken out the digital garbage. It is mostly ads, he finds, with a couple of emails he doesn’t really feel like bothering with. He looks back up, dandy, and tries to think of a new thing to say, hoping this little break has brought him further insight. The body looks up expectantly at the man, so he asks if it would need to be taken home soon, to which the body enthusiastically nods. With that, the three visitors leave the woman’s home (which is well furnished) and return to their vehicle.

“Alright, head count”, says the man. “One,” he begins.

“Two,” replies the teen.

“Three,” the body pipes up from the back, in response to the teen.

“Four!” says Laurence.

The man begins screeching as if there will be no tomorrow. He did not expect an unexpected visitor today, and being faced with one gives him a righteous scare, which ripples through him like it’s radioactive. He frantically yanks his keys out of the ignition, and begins to point the ♀-emblazoned pepper spray on the other side of the chain towards Laurence. To this, Laurence retorts, “Hey, man, don’t. I’m actually really friendly, and I’m only here to help you guys out.”

The man doesn’t holster his weapon, but he does stop moving, continuing to glare at Laurence, allowing him the podium. “Listen, if there’s one thing I hate, it’s gotta be failure. I want to make sure that you guys accomplish all of your goals, and I’m gonna do that by promoting hard work, resource management, and, uh, economics.” The man looks sternly at his fellow passengers. The teen appears to be sleeping, curled up catlike with his arms as pillows. The body is very interested in what Laurence has to say, as one can plainly tell by the way that it points at Laurence, cavalierly and jovially, with two index fingers that are wildly, disproportionately long for its frame. The man, despite his best efforts, too finds himself drawn into Laurence’s proposal.

He lowers his weapon and asks, “So what brought you to me?”

Laurence replies, cheerily, “LinkedIn!” The man relents. That checks out. He passes Laurence the aux, and begins driving. (By the way, Laurence has a wonderful taste in music, here beginning with some life-affirming Rocksteady courtesy of Carlton & The Shoes, before progressing to modern, mildly-psychedelic Jazz-rap, and ultimately some cuts off of Laurence’s own album, which at this point only existed on his phone, as an mp3 file folder. His music took clear aesthetic influence from the preceding genres, and others, with an underlying structure reminiscent of early indie rock, artists such as Phlegm, and Scrotum.)

“Wow,” says the teen as the group of four get off the highway, enthusiastic after Laurence’s new song “Go For the Juggler” reaches its satisfying crescendo, “I can really hear the Scrotum influence.”

Laurence makes an “Oh, stop it” gesture, but no one sees. “You know, I think a lot of my music feels Scrotum-ish, not out of some sort of respect or love I have for the group (though that is also a factor), but of a competitive instinct that tells me that their work is flawed and I can improve upon it.” The man nods, sucking on a Tootsie Pop that Laurence had given him about 3 minutes earlier. Laurence takes a look around, and cheerfully asks, “So what do you guys wanna do after this?” The four all look at each other, a moment which nearly causes them to run off the interstate directly into a badly placed Red Wings.

As the man reasserts control of his vehicle, the body suggests, facing the teen but directed towards all present, “Well, now that I can’t stay in room 213 due to that ‘Death Do Us Part’ clause, would you mind getting me set up in its inverse ‘till I get back on my feet again?”

The teen goes blank, then splenetic. “What the fuck did I tell you (inhuman) about the inverse rooms? You (inhuman) can’t live there if you’re powered by conventional blood. I mean, minimum you (inhuman) are gonna get turned inside out.”

The body taps its head and persists, “Ahh, but you see, the homunculaic treatment probably hyperized all of my static enzymes, letting me persist in non-euclidean spaces indefinitely! Nobody’s ever tried it!”

The teen looks on, incredulous, saying “You (inhuman) fucking brutal nitwit. Demented piece of shit. None of that has anything to do with it. The inverse rooms are highly regulated, and any orthogonal movement gets detected by the motherfucking! The yocto sensors! You (inhuman) will get essentially boiled alive in air, nope, I can’t let you die.”

The body snaps its fingers and goes “Ooh…”, as the teen looks on smugly and finishes his thought.

“Don’t worry. I wouldn’t have brought life into the world without some sort of plan.” He opens the notes app on his phone, which has two checked off items: “Go to work” and “Toke,” and two that were as of yet unchecked: one written in emojis, and “Get fucked up!” The teen looks to Laurence, as the car comes to a stop in the parking lot, unfortunately, much further from the entrance than the spot that the car had utilized before.

Laurence gives it a little bit of thought, and snaps his fingers. “Eureka!” He waits a little bit until the others begin to pay attention to him, and continues. “I’ve got a couple of friends who are hired for CodeWorks. Do you (inhuman) have any CS experience?” This shorthand might have seemed harmless, it certainly did to Laurence, but the body instead assumes that CS stands not for computer science, a discipline it has no experience or interest in, but instead Corn Syrup, a beloved product that it and every other American finds tasty, plentiful, and nutritious.

“I have an intense passion for CS, and while my resume may not reflect it, I’ve been utilizing it for basically my entire life.” Laurence looks trustingly through, not at, the body. “I’m gonna take a chance on you,” he declares, patting the body once on the back, finding it to be covered in some sort of oil, landing softly and slipping off in a way that makes Laurence wish that he too had brought some of the teen’s disinfectant spray, which Laurence recognizes that he stands a snowball’s chance in hell of snagging a squirt of.

It has now been about two minutes since the four parked, and the man finally decides to make the first move, getting out and locking the doors by instinct. This is a bad move, as once the door comes re-unlocked due to one of his passengers trying to get out, the panic alarm begins to blare, alerting the local authorities. The closest is a miniature ambulance, who greets the alarm with a siren and arrives at the scene within about 20 seconds. The driver of the ambulance gets out and approaches the passenger-side window aggressively, brandishing a massive rifle. “Are you the owner of this vehicle, sir?”, asks the overworked twenty-two year old EMT.

“Yes, sir, this is my car, I can show you the registration-.”

“Hey! I am not a cop, that trick doesn’t work on me”, the EMT replies. At this point, the man is out of the car, and the body has begun to exit. The EMT immediately and unabashedly shoots the body, which falls with a thud somewhat dampened by its oily skin and clothes. “Hey, you can’t do that!”, says the man. “You’re supposed to be saving people, not vice versa!” The EMT smirks, keeping the rifle upright, and says, “Ha. No offense, but I’ve been doing this for five years now. I started in high school! I know a homunculus when I see one. Believe me, it’s a lot happier this way. I could get you all in a lot of trouble for this, but fortunately for you lot I couldn’t be bothered.” The EMT gets back into the ambulance and drives off, doing a couple donuts, blaring bass-boosted Boomer Punk at something like 120 dB, peeling out onto the 45 mph road already speeding. Laurence, recognizing that the coast is clear, exits the vehicle.

“I am so, so disappointed in the both of you”, the teen says to the man and Laurence, as he steps out of the vehicle.

“Wha- what did I do?”, they both ask simultaneously, at this point focusing more on being blamed for something than the shooting that had just occurred.

The teen responds, regarding the man and Laurence respectively, “Obviously I’m disappointed in you because you caused this to happen, you blasted that alarm and let basically all of the nearby medical workers know that we were carrying. But you, Laurence, sitting idly by, not doing a damn thing. That’s almost worse. You both will be punished in due time, but first, can y’all help me out with this?” At first the man chuckles, amused at the task ballooning from a two-man job to a three-man job so quickly. However, as he begins to attempt to lift the body, he finds it about twice as heavy as before, and is extremely grateful for Laurence’s help. The three bring the body in, again facing no recourse, and the leading teen brings the group to the elevator and unlocks a latch in front with a massive key, allowing a down option which he utilizes. This elevator is a little anachronistic. it plays the classic “elevator music”, a twee little song made up of little hos and hums and bullshit like that. The group finds themselves on floor -2, and the teen makes a beeline for -213, which is pretty close. He outruns the man and laurence, sliding the, to reiterate, oily man out of their clutches and running into the room, which the man and laurence are unfortunately unable to see inside of, only noticing a deep orange glow radiating from behind the door. The two wait a couple of minutes before they begin trying to leave. The elevator is inaccessible without the teen’s big-ass key, so it seems to the man that the only option would be the stairs. As the man enters the stairwell, Laurence reaches out, mildly, but does not earn the man’s attention, the big metal door slamming itself between the man and Laurence with a thick scrape, like 1961 in Berlin. The man looks around. He is at the bottom of an off-white desolate stairwell, undergirded by the faint fuzz of some sort of device. If he wanted, he could go up under the last couple stairs and hide, but he’d long since repressed such childish urges.

The man immediately starts trying to pull the door back open, but finds it won’t budge. It displays the number “623466” loudly across the front, which the man has no trouble committing to memory. He sighs. It appears that four sets of stairs stand between him and the outside, assuming the existence of a “zeroth” floor. He begins climbing, singing a song, carrying on. After four sets, he resumes yanking on the door, and again finds it again totally wedged shut. He notices that the number, “623466”, has not changed. At this point the man becomes scared. He races back down four flights, no longer singing, and finds that this section no longer marks the end of the stairwell; in fact, it seems that the steps just continue down for as long as his eyes can see. The man stops to consider, and decides that it is easier to climb down stairs than up them, and so he resumes his trudging. his phone remains stuck at 6:37, so he has no way to tell how long he remains walking.

After about 20 sleeps, his hearing starts to go. His senses of taste and smell, as well as emotions of hunger, yearning, anger, joy, and anomie, had begun to fade immediately but were at this point long gone. The number on the door still had not changed, and remained wedged. Usually a sense not in use starts deteriorating after a week and a half, and sure enough the rhythms of this exercise eventually become so rote that sight, touch, and balance are more afterthoughts than anything, smoothed out in no time at all, like a stone in a river. After about 50 sleeps, the man is a husk, carrying out the same action over and over with no sensory perception or critical thinking capabilities. He is no longer aware of the door, or anything; every aspect of his brain has rotten away from unuse. The last bastion of his humanity, something not stored within his brain, leaves him soon after. The man, fetal in the corner, sits still and silent. The number on the door shifts to “623467”.

Laurence is fortunately let upstairs by the teen a soft thirty seconds, his time, after the man left. Within the next year, he wins five different awards for his work in synergistic media solutions and teamwork compatibility management, and the year after becomes a household name for his hit song “Bumpin’ (No Stress)”. He spends very little time considering the man or the body, but ultimately runs into the teen in line at a Starbucks in Austin, Texas, when the teen is 35 and Laurence is 50. The teen chats Laurence up for about a minute, they take a picture together, and part ways. Laurence, on going outside, is tazed to death by an EMT wearing a VR headset, and dies writhing on the ground. The teen, at this point a man himself, sips from his cup of raw, unblemished sugar syrup and smirks. “Ain’t Life a Bitch.”