Isosceles

The evening’s final rays of sunshine penetrated into his study and became suspended into brilliant patterns of light; scintillating within the glass geometric models he kept on the table. On a clear day in the early evening, his room would dance with the lustre of the dusk filtered through these glass models and fill the otherwise melancholy space with a radiant display of the sublime. He seldom noticed these nuanced moments of beauty. He seldom noticed anything besides the triangles. With a sharp, almost mechanical precision, his hand steadily etched a perfect 45 degree radial arm of what was to be a right-angle triangle on another sheet of graphing paper.  He needed not a ruler, nor a T-square; as the ratios and proportions of the triangles he drew were an integral component of his decisive coordination; carefully projecting the models from his mind into the tangible greatness of reality. His hand guided the movements of the drafting pencil across the paper with the precision of a surgeon’s first laceration into a quadruple bypass. When the triangle was complete, he pondered it for a good few minutes. He stepped back and basked in the product of his labour. Isosceles knew he had created perfection. He adored that the sum of the squares of the opposite and adjacent angles equalled the square of the hypotenuse. He loved the sine ratios, the cosine ratios, the secant ratios, and every other self-evident aspect that this most sacred polygon was a manifestation of God himself into Isosceles’ beloved discipline of mathematics.

He mounted the triangle up above his drawing table to accompany the other thousands of triangles he had amassed throughout his lifetime.  The walls of his study were enveloped in triangles. He pinned up pictures of bridges with distinct triangular patterns in them, news articles mentioning triangles, etchings and diagrams of triangles, and countless other constituents of his shrine to three-sided polygons. His favourite types of triangles however, were right-angle triangles. Isosceles felt that the ratios and proportions of a perfect right-angle triangle were a deep affirmation of the logical consistency to life. He clung to the triangles like a rock against all the doubt and illogical nonsense he endured about his daily routine. Tomorrow would be the first day of classes in the fall semester. Isosceles dreaded having to emerge from the nurturing solitude of his triangles to face the spiteful gazes of other humans roaming about the university campus. His employment could have been worse, as he had so often contemplated, but the awkward relationships Isosceles shared with his fellow professors made his life at the university a rather disheartening experience.  Nobody understood Isosceles; not like his triangles did. Triangles were the dominion in which he was a god.

There came a knock upon his study door.

“Come in.”

Paige softly opened the door and stood in the entranceway of his room. She wore a grey blouse and a black skirt; her dark hair was tied up on the back of her head.

“Good evening professor, I was just making sure you had your lesson plan arranged for tomorrow.”

Isosceles peered over his shoulder to meet her gaze and motioned with his hand to the neatly stacked papers on his desk. They were soaked in sunlight. Paige sighed with a tone of apprehension and took another step into the room.

“I have been worrying about you professor. We all have been. It seems that lately you haven’t been spending any time with people. You’re too caught up in your work.”

Paige was Isosceles’ housekeeper. She was a young woman in her early twenties earning money to pay off her student loans. Her bodily structure was composed of symmetrical proportions and soft, angelic angles. The features of her face were acute and feminine while the angular curve of her backside was desirably obtuse. As Isosceles viewed her as both an attractive and intelligent woman, her presence in his home was a welcome taste of human company. She was usually left to her own accord to keep his house clean of dust and his clothes stainless and ironed. During the downtime, she studied for her classes or sometimes read the myriad of trigonometry tomes Isosceles kept in his library; to be filed alphabetically, as he had so vehemently insisted upon.

“Don’t worry about me Paige. I’ll be fine. It’s just all the work I’ve been doing to prepare for tomorrow.”

She glanced at the geometric models he kept on the table.

“You should really open your curtains all the way professor. The light is so nice in here this time of the evening.”

Paige shrugged and then turned to leave, gently shutting the door behind her.

            The following day, Isosceles set his coat on the back of his chair and organized his lesson plan. The lecture hall was large and imposing like an empty cathedral. The shuffling of his papers reverberated throughout the room like a man’s cry echoing in the opiate-ridden peaks of Appalachia. He glanced out to the hallway which was soon to fill up with thousands of University students. A familiar frump in a brown tweed jacket crossed the doorway. Isosceles called out to him.

“Hey, Dr. Crandall, can you spare some chalk? Somebody appears to have taken mine.”

The man walked into his lecture hall, ignoring his request. Isosceles asked again for chalk. Crandall glanced to the collection of implements and instruments on his desk.

“You see that X-Acto knife there Dr. Triangle?”

“What about it, Dr. Crandall?”

“Imagine the feeling of that utility knife being thrust into the back of your hand!”

Isosceles flinched.

“You know that feeling triangle boy? That’s me. That’s what I am to you; is a utility knife thrust into your hand. Don’t ever so much as speak before my presence, or I will shoot you with my musket. You can never comprehend the deep intricacies of reality within the span of your pathetic lifetime, and you waste it studying triangles.  I, as a superiorly enlightened human specimen can attain a certain higher morality than you. I am the master of morality, and you are but a slave to me. The mere presence of your putrid slave morality has harmed me to an unfathomable extent. Don’t ever look me in the eye again!”

“I’m sorry; I just wondered if you had any chalk I could borrow.”

Crandall stormed out of the lecture room without responding.

Crandall had been the head of the Philosophy department at McMaster University for the past nine miserable years. He and his department of woe-begotten miscreants and borderline-schizophrenic orators had a particular grudge against the likes of the Mathematics department, whom they denounced as being charlatans to the pursuit of capital R, Reason, and capital T, Truth. It was Isosceles in particular whom they targeted their bullying.  Dr. Crandall and his female accomplice, Dr. Stragger had virulently tormented the Trigonometry teacher by nailing Cartesian plots depicting crossed vertical asymptotes to his classroom door and etching disfigured triangles whose total degrees were more than 180 upon his chalkboard. They rarely spoke to him, except to mock his study.

He reclined in his chair and watched as the fresh batch of students slowly trickled into his classroom, reminiscent of the congregation of flies to a fleshly-laid dropping of shit on the sidewalk. Isosceles felt an unnerving disdain towards those students who did not hold trigonometry to the high regard that he did. They were born into wealthy families and their parents paid for their University tuition with the sole intention of removing them from the basements. During his lectures, they played Minecraft and surfed Reddit on their high-end laptops and sent each other insipid and redundant text messages via their BlackBerrys. After class, they retreated back to their frat houses, drank themselves into retardation, and fornicated like insects. Isosceles had never recalled any of his students displaying the slightest interest in his lessons. They had no reverence for the majesty of his triangles.

“And so, as we can see from this graph, the period of this sine wave is 360 degrees. The amplitude of a sine wave is indicated by a. For instance, the amplitude of f(x) =4sin(x+2π)-2 is 4.”

An obese male in the front row interrupted his lecture.

“Excuse me sir, but what application does this stuff have to the real world?”

“Actually, there are no shortage of practical examples I can name to which trigonometry is applicable. In computer programming for instance...”

“No, that’s not what I meant. How the hell do sine waves help us to find jobs?”

Isosceles winced.

“Is that all you kids care about, is finding jobs? Don’t you care about the mathematic concepts?”

“Yeah, math is good if you want to be a charlatan all your life.”

The class laughed.

“Dr. Stragger and Dr. Crandall teach philosophy and its application to real world situations. They teach us the think laterally and critically. They teach us about logical strategies to cope with problems that arise in the business world. You teach us about Sine Waves.”

“That’s because this is a mathematics class. If you wish to learn about philosophy, you should not have taken a Trigonometry course!”

This was precisely the brand of insolence from which his triangles provided refuge. He didn’t understand how anyone could be so wilfully ignorant of these mathematical concepts-- It wasn’t as though they were difficult to understand. Later that evening, Isosceles drove the 5 miles to his secluded rural estate and retreated back to the solitude of his study. At his request, Paige brought him some sliced cantaloupe and a glass of warm milk, homogenized, with 3% fat.

“How did your first class go Professor? Do you have any aspiring mathematicians among the lot?

He grunted and sunk his head deeper into the papers on the desk.

“So, what did you cover in your lesson today? Trigonomic identities? The Pythagorean Theorem?”

“Sine wave functions.”

“Oh, well that’s neat. I love Sine waves.”

“Great. That makes two of us at least.”

She walked closer to the desk at which he was seated. His palm was buried in his thick, greying hair, supporting the exhausted weight of his skull. Though Isosceles did not drink, his face bore the expression of a man whose spirit was defeated by alcohol as he leaned forward, towering over his work—tomorrow’s lesson plan and a few sketches of some triangles he had recently drawn up.

“I take it you wish to be left alone now Professor?”

Paige had worked at his home for just over three years now. Even though she had developed the personal relationship appropriate for her to address him as otherwise, it always just felt correct to call him Professor.

“If you don’t mind. I have a lot of work to do.”

He watched her ass while it oscillated gracefully from side to side as she walked out the room.

That putrid excuse for a life form, the one whom Isosceles had come to know as John, again interrupted his lecture. It was the final review before the weekly test and the conceited, overweight bastard had the audacity to interrupt his explanation of how the cescant ratio of a triangle equalled the reciprocal of its cosine ratio. The young man’s insolence was merely an obstacle he had come to accept. John was also taking Dr. Crandall’s philosophy class and was told to be metacritical of the doctrines opposed upon him by the mathematics department.

“Dr. Crandall told me that Pythagoras was an insane cult leader whose deceitful banter was not be trusted!”

Isosceles winced.

“It is irrelevant whether Pythagoras was a tyrannical cult leader or not, his concepts are infallible. It doesn’t take a genius to see that the tangent ratio equals the sine over the cosine ratio!”

“But what if the tangent ratio doesn’t really equal the sine over the cosine ratio? What if mathematics is only a mere illusion? The only thing that I know is that I exist! Everything else in life is but a mere assumption. Cogito Ergo Sum!”

Isosceles would have kicked him out of his class if the University had not given him a generous raise to stop doing precisely that. He would be lying if he told you that at times he didn’t think about not accepting that raise. There were students like John in every course he taught at McMaster. They were the wealthy pseudo-intellectuals, the incorrigible, thoughtless drones who saw it their way to conduct themselves with a demeanour of unwarranted self-righteousness. They were the valiant heirs to the future world, as they had learned in their philosophy class, and they virulently denounced everything that either stood between their arrogance and reality, or likewise, that which they did not have the capacity to comprehend. Isosceles had endured their antics before; there were uglier, stupider, more porous students than John that his patience had withstood, but he knew it was the growing influence of Dr. Crandall and his philosophy department that bred these over-sceptical creatures. He didn’t know how much longer he could put up with them.

Isosceles had never attended any of Dr. Crandall’s lectures. He had heard that Dr. Crandall gave the most passionate, exuberant lectures pertaining to epistemology, metaphysics, and the nature of reality, but Isosceles had never found a time when he would not rather have been amongst his triangles. However, It was a certain feeling he got, looking into the eyes of the smug bastard who sat before him, that compelled him to finally see what Crandall’s students were always going off about.

“Uh, John, when is Dr. Crandall’s next lecture?”

John swallowed his mouthful of hamburger and responded.

“It’s this afternoon at 3:00. He is going to introduce us to the great works of Arthur Schopenhauer. Dr. Crandall said very clearly that he doesn’t want any math teachers to come though. He says your dogmatic influence stifles his philosophic contemplation.”

Isosceles winced.

Later that afternoon, Isosceles walked briskly across the campus to Dr. Crandall’s lecture hall. It was at least twice the size of his, and he could see an ample supply of fresh chalk at all the blackboards. He took his seat in the last row to avoid making eye contact with Crandall and being struck with a musket ball or stuck with a utility knife. Dr. Stragger sat in the front row making conversation with the students beside her, one of whom Isosceles recognized as John.

Dr. Stragger was a middle-aged woman who had a disproportionately high level of enthusiasm for the likes of Dr. Crandall’s philosophy teachings. During his lectures, she attentively leaned forward at the edge of her seat, contingent upon every word he spoke. She memorized his debate tactics, his arguments, and every position he held on every contemporary subject in anticipation for the misfortunate drudge who was to come along and challenge her philosophical convictions. To compensate for her gnomish stature, thick strands of frizzed chestnut hair burst from atop her head like the eruption of a mud geyser, much to the plight of those whom she sat directly ahead. Isosceles had made it a point to avoid her presence whenever convenient.

He watched Dr. Crandall’s monolithic entrance to the stage. There was a noticeable tension in any room Crandall entered. He had a distinct air of self importance; the profligate expression of many ostentatious hand gestures and the unnecessary exaggeration of otherwise menial movements demanded the attention of all who beheld him. The tension those felt being in his presence was described as a sentiment of impending doom or of the suspense before a jury’s final deliberation. Nobody spoke during his lectures; they did not interrupt him, nor did they mock him or deliberately misunderstand him. His students were the most diligent of pupils, eagerly awaiting the slew of philosophical jargon which they would unquestionably absorb—to be regurgitated when any confrontation with the mathematics faculty were to arise.

“Good afternoon fellow admirers of philosophy.”

His voice resonated with the volume of a grand cathedral. To hundreds of over-privileged youngsters and liberal arts students among him, this was their god.

“Fellow philosophers, we have come upon my favourite part of the semester that is the great study of nineteenth-century German Idealism.”

Isosceles chuckled to himself.

“To hell with Belarusian idealism!” He thought.

Isosceles took his ham sandwich out of the Tupperware container. He was pleased to see that Paige had remembered to cut the bread diagonally, leaving two right angle triangle-shaped sandwich halves. Indeed, Paige had never once forgotten his daily routine, but it always pleased him nonetheless to see the two triangles awaiting his consumption.

“As I mentioned yesterday, we shall commence our study with a biography on Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the greatest philosophers of the past few centuries. He was born in 1788 in present-day Gdansk, Poland. Perhaps one of the most notable pessimists in philosophical debate is embodied in his pinnacle work, The World as Will and Representation, first published in 1818.”

Isosceles had never before heard the name of this man of whom Crandall spoke so highly.


“Of the many topics on which Schopenhauer wrote, one of the most unique among philosophers were his opinions regarding love and affection. Having been rejected by many women throughout his life, Schopenhauer lived alone with his poodles and his philosophy. His loneliness was commonly attributed to his extreme pessimistic, albeit realistic view of the world. He found little joy in money, fame, women, or education; his mother refused him to speak to houseguests in fear that he may depress them, and he toiled in obscurity until he achieved fame only a year before his death. Schopenhauer is a particularly admirable figure in philosophy precisely for this reason. It was his bleak worldview that denied him happiness, but it was this view that he held against all the nonsense he perceived about his daily life. I conjecture that to stand by one’s principles is a much more noble position than the pursuit of blind whims.”

Although he had never before displayed any inclination or interest whatsoever to study philosophy in the past, Isosceles was captivated by the life of this man whom he had never even known. There was a certain familiarity with this biography that aroused his curiosity. Having never had the time to seek out a spouse for himself due to his extensive studies, Isosceles knew, from listening to the plight of this Schopenhauer fellow, that he ought to peruse his quest for love. There was only one woman in his life that did not repulse him; she was the only one to share nearly the same passion for triangles that he did. Suddenly, he was captivated by the spontaneous urge to seek this woman out and tell her how he felt. He snuck out of the lecture hall, though was certain that Crandall had caught a glimpse of his presence in doing so.



Paige slid the giant mathematic tome back on the shelf. The professor’s library was immense. After decades of accumulating everything in the least bit pertaining to his niche, the shelves, of which there were hundreds, had been crammed with more books than one was likely to encounter in a single dwelling. Even the University had a collection that seemed miniscule in comparison to his. He had often complained to Paige about the incompetence of the University’s book collection, although it was unlikely that any worldly institution could have met Isosceles’ high standards of academic prestige. She enjoyed spending time reading his books that she would often lose track of time and find herself well into the early hours of the morning enthralled in a volume of advanced functions or vector calculus. The resources had been an invaluable aid to her study at McMaster. There were many instances in which a book found in the library had saved her on a test or had guided her through a particularly difficult unit. Now in her final year of university, she knew that she owed a debt of gratitude to these tomes, and of course to Isosceles himself. She climbed down the ladder and walked to the kitchen in order to prepare the professor’s evening tea.

When she entered his study, she found him standing, with his back to the door, looking nonchalantly out the window. The curtains had been opened all the way and the sunlight shone through the magnificent window, casting a breathtaking pattern of light into the room as it shone through the glass geometric objects on the table. She had never been taken by such a majestic scene before, and at this moment, the study was more resplendent than any other time that she had beheld it.

“I remember that day when you told me to open the curtains all the way. I have to agree with you Paige, that the room looks much nicer having done so.”

“Yes it does. Anyways, I left your tea on the night stand.”

She turned to leave.

“Wait, there’s something I have to tell you.”

“What is it?”

Isosceles turned from the window, and knelt down on one knee before his housekeeper, holding forth a large diamond ring in a velvet box. The diamond was in the shape of a perfect triangular pyramid and shone brightly, more so because of the majestic reflection of sunlight in its finely cut surface.

“Paige, I’ve always thought that you were the smartest, most beautiful woman I have ever met. I have never been more certain of anything in all my life than I am of this. Paige, will you do me the honour of taking my hand in marriage?”

She was silent only for a few seconds, though the tension he felt had made it seem like hours. Then, a look of unadulterated sympathy manifested upon her mouth and a tear streamed down her left cheek. She gently shut the velvet box with her hand, unable to bear the sight of the diamond ring.
“I’m so very sorry Professor, but I already am engaged. In fact, he is a student in one of your trigonometry classes; John is his name. I have told him about you, how he should make an attempt to connect with you professor, as the both of you are very smart indeed. However, I see that such a bond was not to be.”

Isosceles stared at her with hollow eyes. His face was empty of any expression, and he for a brief moment imagined the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and that the familiarity he had sensed was in relation to his own life—his own social and romantic incompetence.

“I’m very sorry professor, but I really must go now. I have been considering this for some time, but I hope you understand if I don’t come in to work tomorrow, or any other day for that matter.”

She turned away to depart, and Isosceles listened to the exhaust of her automobile as she drove away, never again to bring him tea or sliced cantaloupe; never again to sort his books or iron his clothes, never again to slice his sandwiches or comfort him in the wake of his interpersonal misfortunes. A wave of emotion, half-way between the searing fervour of rage and the lowly grip of sadness consumed him from his somewhere deep in his chest, and he once again recalled the beauty of a perfect right-angle triangle. However, it yielded him no exaltation. The world, as he had come to know it, was unworthy of the superlative proportions of such flawless splendour. As he looked around his study, and basked in the scintillating radiance of the reflected light, soaking the various trigonometry articles he had pinned up on the wall, realized, that he too was unworthy of their splendour. Isosceles remembered a revolver he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk, in fear of looters that may break in to steal his precious work. He retrieved it and held the barrel up to his right temple, and as a spray of his teeth and grey matter painted the drawing he had etched weeks prior; for the very first time, Isosceles had become one with the triangles.

Ruckus

Distinguished Ontario Provincial Police Officer Rex Kaiser Von Grande and his esteemed Deputy Lilith sat idly inside the James Street cafe, replenishing their caffeine levels after a long day of tazing homeless folks and killing innocent people’s highs.

Lilith: Why is it, I’m just wondering, that the only thing we ever eat while we’re on duty are donuts?

Officer Rex paused contemplatively and held up a chocolate glazed donut for his naive partner to behold.

Rex: You see Lilith, a donut is round, as is justice. As upholders of the law, we must eat of the foods of justice and to stand both as actual and metaphorical examples of objective law to our fellows.

Lilith: I don’t quite think I understand Rex, please elaborate further.

Rex: You see Lilith, as a child in public school; I was routinely teased and ridiculed by my classmates. The bullies tormented my experience of the education system, and subsequently I believe that my learning may have adversely been affected-- though that is neither here nor there. My teachers did nothing to stop them from beating me, or from spitting on me, or from throwing sloth and pheasant feces at me during recess. Alone and physically defenceless, I was consoled solely by the fact that one day all my tormenters would be brought to justice!

Now that at last we are not governed by teachers, but by objective law and police enforcement, I am free to dole out justice as I see fit, ergo, the hand of justice has gone full circle, just like this donut! That southing karma I get when I smash my baton off some crackhead’s skull is a constant reminder of why I became a police officer.

Lilith: I see Rex, You are indeed very wise.

Just then, a transmission came over the police radio:

<<We’re getting reports of a Man walking around Bay and Canon Street without a shirt on, possibly intoxicated on marijuana.>>

Rex: Let us be off Lilith! We have justice to appropriate!

The two police officers came upon a dingy looking fellow in his mid 20s, wearing cargo pants, roaming about in an alleyway. Upon hearing the pigs call out to him, he dashed towards them and grasped the female officer’s hand in peril.

Man: Thank the heavens that you guys came in time! I was being chased by sabre-toothed tigers, so I hid in this alleyway. You have to hide me! It’s only a matter of time before they regroup and sleuth us out here!

Lilith: Calm down, what is your name?

Man: My name is Ronald K. Ruckus the Third my lady, my father being the second and my grandfather the first. I descend from a long lineage of ruckus.

Lilith: What a clever alliteration, now what by chance is your real name?

Ronald: I have given you my honest name! Whether you choose to believe that or not is your problem.

Rex: That’s enough of your antics son, let us see some ID!

Ronald: Is not my mere presence proof of my identification? You can plainly see who I am, and under future circumstances under which you require to pick my person out of a line-up or crowd, you should have little difficulty in identifying me.

Rex: So you have no birth certificate? No driver’s license? No health card? Lilith, search his person, I smell us a dope fiend!

Lilith patted the man down, though his pockets were emptier than those of Europe’s pigs, and a good long look into his scleras proved that Ronald was in fact as sober as a Minor Threat-era Ian Mackay. The two officers cuffed Ronald and brought him into the police station for questioning. After taking his fingerprints and giving him no more than 3 cavity searches, they walked him into a small room with a white plastic table and two chairs, at one of which officer Rex forcibly sat him down to continue with their sordid affairs.

Rex: Where do you live?

Ronald: I live in an alternate dimension. Although nearly parallel to this one, everything is exactly 9 seconds behind. I don’t recommend that you ever go there with me, as the missing time could interfere with your bodily clock.

Rex smashed his fist against the table and raised his voice.

Rex: Fuck it son! I am in no mood for your absurdities! You tell me your name and the address of your house, or I shall have you locked away indefinitely for the obstruction of justice!

Ronald: Your implication that my place of residence is in fact a house would be incorrect, as I live in a giant psilocybin toadstool officer, along with my 16 brothers and sisters. No Ruckus is an island.

With his hand buried in his palm and a seething rage boiling over in his heart, Rex raised his voice further, adding a hint of what one may have construed as desperation. He knew that he could not legally detain this agent of lunacy for longer than the statute of limitations decrees, and at risk of being emasculated by some insolent little shit, he snatched the man up out of his seat by the collar.

Rex: Who the hell do you think you are, not to carry any ID on you? You cannot mess with the law like this!

Ronald: I have done nothing to cross your laws. Furthermore, any man who identifies himself solely by the inscriptions on those tiny rectangular slices of plastic is certainly of questionable honour. The essence of my word ought to be far more credible than what I keep in my pants.

Just then, Rex loosened his grip of Ronald’s collar and lowered him back into the chair.

Rex: Get out of here now! I don’t ever want to see you again, and if I do, I won’t hesitate to prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law. I have no time to deal with your bullshit any more kid, you’ll have to go jerk off your ego off someplace else.

Lilith: Rex! You’re just letting him go? What about the full circle of justice?

Rex: Lilith, it should seem evident that the full circle of justice need not apply to those who adhere to no leaders.

Now bring me some more donuts bitch!

The Soil Is Contaminated (Part 3)

Weeks had passed since their meeting and excruciating boredom settled down upon the farmhouse like the ghost of Passover upon the residences of the firstborn. Not a potato was cultivated, nor a penis moistened in the span of time during which her and Merzbow awaited the commencement of their chemotherapy.

There came a knock upon the front door. Expecting to be greeted with a doctor, she was surprised to see a middle-aged Japanese man with long hair standing in her doorway. He wore a thick, black trench-coat and a t-shirt with the slogan “meat is murder” (which it most certainly is not).

“Greetings”, he said. “My name is Masami Akita, may I come inside?”

Merzbow, barely able to suppress his enthusiasm, sat across from Mr. Akita in the olive green armchair in which he often occupied. He wore a beaming, almost unnaturally formed grin. Merzbow was not known to display any conspicuous emotion in the presence of strangers, but having met his lifelong idol for the very first time, he was able to contain naught.

“So, what brings you to our humble farm Mr. Akita? New Brunswick is an awful long way from Japan.”

“I received a call from a friend of mine, Dr. Parvanov—you’ve met him yes? Anyways, he has informed me that you are in possession of something that may be a great deal of importance to me.”

“What would that be?”

“The potatoes you’ve been growing have been contaminated with radioactive soil, as Parvanov has told me. If this is the case, I would like to purchase every potato you have grown and are to grow from now on for the sum of one million dollars.”

She was bewildered, albeit cautious less this be some kind of clever ruse on behalf of Parvanov to crush what had remained of their spirits.

“I can’t imagine what use they could be to you. They can’t be eaten or you will grow hideous tumours on your head. God only knows what that would do to your music career!”

She pointed to the horns on her head, which had grown about an inch since her confrontation with the intoxicated scientist. Masami laughed.

“Oh course I know that! I’m not planning to eat them. Obviously you’ve never sampled the feedback from a radioactive potato before; they make such an eerie, otherworldly sound that would sound amazing with my new split EP with Boris. Besides, it’s the least I could do for such an enduring fan of mine.”

Merzbow perked up.

“Thank you sir, you have no idea what a considerable deed this is. My brother thanks you as well.”

Using the payment they had received from the generous musician, The Emporium of Unsavoury Delights had its grand opening in Miramichi a month later. Her dream, against all odds had finally come to fruition. The magnificent brothel, much like the John Galt line or the Battle of Adwa, stood alongside the glorious triumphs of human history as testament to the fact that one could achieve their most lavish dreams, regardless of how bizarre they are, or how much the odds are stacked against you. Larry, Vern, and Gus were all happily serviced, as were the rest of her clients.

She had not been so selfish to use all the money for herself. With the excess profit, she bought Merzbow a brand new stereo system, and the entire Merzbow discography, complete with all the bootlegs and compilation discs. He wasted not a breath of daylight listening to them all.

One quiet afternoon, about a month after the brothel had opened, a mysterious dark figure walked into the storefront. He had a large Canadian cigar pressed between his lips and a glass of scotch in his left hand.

“Dr. Parvanov! I knew you would have the time to stop by. I cannot thank you enough for helping my dream become a reality. Merzbow thanks you too.”

“Haha it’s no problem really. Mr. Harper thanks you for keeping my plant a secret, and I am glad to see the chemotherapy is going smoothly. The Einsteinites are receding quicker than I would have thought.”

“Yes they are, and these wigs are so very comfortable and stylish. Say, to show my gratitude for not having us killed earlier, your first visit is on the house!”

Parvanov removed his coat and she led him into a vacant room with a bed. She said that when she had been 
transferred into his possession, that it was akin to reclaiming a lost part of herself.


the end

The Soil Is Contaminated (Part 2)

Batman screamed in agony. The scream of pure, unadulterated misery is a sound most people are not likely to so often hear. In fact, unless one is an infantryman or a dental technician, it is improbable that the raw wails of human anguish have ever vibrated into one’s eardrum. It is not a pleasant sound to behold, at least relative to the meow of a kitten or the guffaw of an inebriated comrade.

It however, was precisely this awful sound that was emitted from the masked crusader as he was repeatedly shocked with Dr. Parvanov’s cattle prod. It was the fate that had befallen many intruders found sneaking around in the Cameco Einsteinium Processing Facility.

“What the fuck were you doing here Batman?”

Batman spat some blood onto the floor and responded.

“Let me go Parvanov!”

“Shut up! I let you down once you’ve answered my question. Who sent you here and what were you doing?”

“Fuck you.”

He sunk the shocking end of the cattle prod into Batman’s chest. Again, he let out a high-pitched cry of pain.

“Cough, cough! Damn you Parvanov, you know the radiation your company is infecting the soil with is extremely dangerous. You won’t get away with this treachery!”

Dr. Parvanov reached into the breast pocket of his overcoat and revealed a large calibre handgun. He aimed it at Batman’s face.

“Tell me who sent you!”

“Fuck you Parvanov!”

He was flecked his gore as the projectile pulverized his skull and terminated the intricate function of the tender grey matter residing within.

“Hilda, send the cleaning staff over to room 404. Tell them to bring lots of extra-absorbent towels.”

A distorted female voice responded into the receiver of his walkie-talkie.

“Yes boss. Oh, and there are two people at the front desk here to see you doctor. They say they are potato farmers.”

“But I’m not expecting an appointment with any potato farmers. Tell them to go away.”

“They seem very insistent on speaking with the conductor of operations here Dr. Parvanov. It’s something about the horns that are attached to their heads.”

There was a pause.

“Dr. Parvanov?”

“Send them up to my office.”

Dr. Parvanov poured himself a glass of scotch. He looked at her in a perplexed expression as to demand a justification for their presence in his domain. He was a cold, malevolent nuance, pacing nonchalantly within the sun’s projection of its magnificent rays through the grand window, casting a long black shadow upon her and Merzbow.

“Why did you buy that farm?”

“It belonged to my grandparents! I would have been crestfallen to see it in the possession of anyone outside my family.”

He took a sip of scotch.

“You bad man you! Take nuclear house go away!” a stammering Merzbow spewed out.

Parvanov shifted his owl-like gaze upon him.

“What’s your problem?”

“He has autism. Leave him alone.”

Parvanov snorted. An ironic smirk peeled across his face behind the translucent obstruction of the glassware he held to his lips.

“Neither of you are in any position to be giving orders. I could have you both killed for trespassing upon highly classified government operations. I take my orders from the most powerful man in all of Canada—Steven Harper, and I know for a fact that in my current position, he would not have hesitated to put your throats to the mameluke’s edge!”

Merzbow’s mood degenerated from bold and confrontational to remorseful, and not without good reason. They had no purpose meddling with the government’s affairs in synthetic actiniums. Her brother had the same consternated expression he bore when she had found him passed out in the agglomeration of oestrogen supplement scattered upon the bathroom floor on that fateful evening.

“You two know what a grave situation this is, don’t you?”

They both hung their heads.

“This of course is Canada’s preliminary laboratory of Einsteinium research. Its existence is not mentioned in any Wikipedia articles of Facebook pages, and as such, Mr. Harper and I wish to maintain the secrecy of this clandestine operation.”

“But what does that have to do with us?”

Parvanov took another sip of his scotch and seated himself.

“You are to undergo chemotherapy in order to remove the malignant protrusions on your heads. No mention of what transpires here shall be discussed by either of you in any form or context from here thereafter. Do I make myself clear?”

She grabbed with both hands the horns atop her head.

“You mean to tell me these are tumours?!”

There was an overtone of general disgust in her vocal projection, perhaps more likely to have been used while wading through a labyrinthine septic tank or in the city of Winnipeg. Parvanov lit a cigar. Being an expert on cigars herself, she recognized from the label that it was an authentic Canadian cigar. He coughed a little as he spoke.

“No. Not quite. The politically correct term would be Einsteinites. They share many properties with the behaviour of skin cancer. They form as a result of eating potatoes grown with einsteinium-contaminated soil. You foolish humans—that is why the government took that farm away from your grandparents! I have no idea how the two of you managed to sneak back onto that farm without our detection.”

“We are sorry.”

Parvanov’s office was large and imposing like a bouncer from one of the nightclubs she used to frequent when she lived in Fredericton. It consisted of many sharp angles and vertical lines. The sun’s light shone through the grand pane behind the desk and whispered the breath of life into his room of inhumanity. Parvanov’s office reeked of a cold, systematic inhumanity such as that of bureaucratic ostentation or of the holocaust.

He poured himself a third glass of scotch.

“I have noticed you are wearing a Merzbow t-shirt. Surely anyone who claims to be a fan of Merzbow’s so-called music cannot possibly have the self-respect sufficient not to be a prostitute.”

“Indeed, this is my brother’s shirt, but I am a proud prostitute, until recently that these horns have forced me to give up the profession.”

He stroked his beard contemplatively.

“My dream was to open the very first brothel/potato farm in Canada. However, since the otherwise luscious russet potatoes I have been cultivating are radioactive, my dream, sadly, will never come to fruition.”

Parvanov took another sip of scotch. It was apparent to the two agriculturists that his behaviour betrayed elevated blood-alcohol content surely sufficient to have impaired his operation of an automobile or some kind of heavy machinery. It may have been his state of intoxication, or his affinity for sarcasm, but she had noticed him to be slightly more empathetic to her plight than when they had first met him.

“I shall have my doctor visit your estate in a few weeks to commence your treatment.” He said with the semblance of a smile.

“Now be gone from here! You have already seen more of this operation than Mr. Harper would have been comfortable with.”

She and Merzbow left his office with the feeling that nothing of importance had neither been communicated nor accomplished by their meeting with this drunken bureaucrat. Farming and prostitution are surely best left in the hands of trained professionals.

Parvanov picked up his walkie-talkie.

“Hilda, please get Mr. Akita on the phone. I must speak with him at once.”

The Soil is Contaminated (Part 1)

Although it had only cost her two hundred dollars to buy the estate, she said that when the deed had been transferred into her possession, that it was akin to reclaiming a lost part of herself. The farm had belonged to her grandparents for many years before the government seized the property. She held fond memories of the summers that she used to spend there long ago; harvesting the rich tubers from the soil, petting the family ass, or swinging off the Toyo tire and plunging deep into the icy water of the abandoned amosite quarry nearby. Ever since one evening when she lay out in the dew-soaked pastures, looking up at the deep yawning abyss of stars and interplanetary miscellanea, she knew that her purpose in life was to harvest potatoes. New Brunswick was full of potato farmers, indeed, many of the denizens who she had been acquainted with as an adolescent earned a wage growing spuds, but she was determined to grow the potatoes most plentiful of starch and abundant with nutrients than any other agricultural institution in Canada.

Her parents had begotten a male of inferior mental capacity whom they had neglected to name before they had disowned him on account of his condition. After his favourite musical composer, she entitled him Merzbow. He was a tall, somewhat androgynous child-shaped man; a timid creature of introverted tendency who only ever spoke to his big sister. As anyone who knew Merzbow as well as anyone who could have known Merzbow would tell you, was that his waking (and a fraction of his dreaming) life was spent listening to Merzbow. Any interpersonal relationship was scarce. Yet, out of loyalty to his sister, in whom he had invested a great deal of trust, he decided to accompany her on her agricultural conquest.

The first week of her potato farming saw her spend the necessary capital to restructure the crumbling farmhouse and purchase nitrogen-enriched fertilizer with which to optimize her yield. On Saturday evenings, when Merzbow was securely fastened into his crib, she drove her Cadillac Eldorado out to the nearby municipality of Miramichi. She would park the automobile in a garage and stand scantily-clad, bathed in the twilight of the streetlamps on Main Street. She would wait for an hour, perhaps even two, before a client would pull up beside her and inquire about her wares. The usual fee was twenty dollars. The client would then drive her back to his apartment (which on occasion was a house) and possess her in ways that bordered upon the unsavoury. Her raison d’être may have been potato farming, but her second love was prostitution. Suffice to say that she had missed the Sunday sermon which denounced the inclination to be fucked by strangers. To her, it wasn’t masochism, nor was it a manifestation of self-hatred, but merely an honest hobby which she held dear. When she had earned a reasonable profit by harvesting tubers, her dream, as she called it, was to open the very first potato and hooker franchise to satisfy both the genitalia and digestive cavities of all the good citizens of New Brunswick.

It was on one particular night, upon returning home from her sordid sexual escapades, that she was to find her brother unconscious on the bathroom floor. To her mortification, he had consumed an entire bottle of oestrogen supplements, using a ball peen hammer to incur his retarded wrath down upon the child-proof cap. Both frightened and angry, she had known that a transgression of this nature was only inevitable, as Merzbow had lately shown the intention of escaping his crib and that night she had neglected to fasten his straps properly. After she had awoken him, he received a thorough lecture about the dangers of wanting freedom.

“Merzbow, what did you think you were doing? Why did you eat all my oestrogen?”

“I thought they were skittles.”

He had an expression that resembled remorse; an upturned lip and hollow, sad eyes.

“You’re probably going to start growing tits now Merzbow!”

She slapped him upside the head, not hard enough to induce injury, but sufficient to convey her frustration with him. Merzbow retreated back to the solitude of his bedroom and cranked Venereology at maximum volume. She returned later to fasten him into his crib—tightly.

After months of strenuous labour, she had grown enough crops to nourish the both of them. Farming potatoes was a cold, methodical process; the sowing of the sprouts and the raising of the crop. Her farming skills were superlative. Long ago, her grandfather had shown her how to cultivate the land with competence. When he wasn’t listening to Merzbow, Merzbow usually helped water the plants or spray pesticides in order to kill the beetles that gnawed away at the stems, rendering the potatoes unfit for human consumption.

She noticed two odd protrusions on his head one evening at suppertime.

“Now look what you’ve done to yourself Merzbow! You’re sprouting horns from that oestrogen you ate. Perhaps you should see a doctor."

 As she had scolded him several times about speaking with his mouth full, he devoured his mouthful of mashed potato; the gargantuan under-bite flapping loosely beneath his palate and chewing the starchy substance into a fine paste by which to fall with greater ease down Merzbow’s esophagus and into the confines of his digestive tract.

“I don’t want to see a doctor.”

“But those things are like an inch long! Who knows if they will get any bigger? You don’t want to look like a freak, now do you?"

At her response, Merzbow burst into a tantrum of blubbering tears. He stumbled out of his high-chair and run back to his room. The door slammed and she could hear the faint sound of 1930 being played on his stereo. Once he had weeped himself to exhaustion, she tightly strapped him back into his crib. She always thought that Merzbow looked so peaceful, so tranquil after a good cry. The moonlight poured in through the window and caressed the back of Merzbow’s malformed skull. She reached out and felt the protrusions on his head between the grip of her thumb and forefinger. They were tough, yet weightless like gristle or Styrofoam.

“It’s probably nothing to worry too much about.” She thought, and closed the door to his room behind her.

Silently and gracefully, she slipped into her plastic mini-skirt and zipped up her knee-high leather boots to prepare for yet another evening of vice upon the streets of Miramichi. She got into her Eldorado and drove to the same parking garage and stood at the same avenue at which she prostituted herself every week, yet no clients availed themselves to her. She was devastated. She waited for four hours. She waited for Vern and his Hyundai Sonata, who had called upon her services many times, for Larry and his Ford Econo with trash bags stretched over the windows in which the two of them would fuck like hyenas, or even for Gus, the filthy, hairy Vietnam veteran who had a smelly cock and always underpaid. None of them came. She drove back to the farmhouse in shame.

As her Eldorado pulled up the gravel road to the farmhouse, it seemed to her that the potato pastures emitted a soft red glow. The moon was full that night and the rolling landscape was soaked in the sun’s borrowed light. However, there was something particularly askew about the glow of the fields. She would not have the mind to pay this anomaly its due consideration, as when she went into the bathroom to remove her pomegranate no. 9 makeup and her pink plastic mini-skirt, she was confronted with an abhorrent scene. The very same protrusions that her brother had grown, lay upon her head as well, albeit nearly twice as long. The two naked bumps that poked above her hairline mocked her. They stood as a stark reminder that she would never again feel the embrace of a misshapen fisherman or quarry worker. Her spirits had descended to a depth from which the sunlight was no longer visible. Her dreams had been dashed to the ground, shattering into a myriad of unsalvageable bits and fragmentations. She stood motionless before the shattered dream that starred back at her from the bathroom mirror—an apoplectic horror captured within a pane of glass.

“You still have the potatoes.” She repeated to herself in a vain attempt at self comfort.

She awoke from a turbulent slumber the following morning to the urgent cries of her little brother. She rushed into his room and saw him motioning to the window.

“Smoke! Red Smoke! Look!” He kept saying in his rather unattractive speech impediment.

Sure enough, there were tuffs of red smoke billowing from the horizon that seemed consistent with an industrial smokestack or perhaps a modest-sized grease fire. The smoke appeared very dense and smothering. The colour was that of fresh, unoxidized blood.

She dressed Merzbow and herself in a violent fit, throwing on one of his old Merzbow t-shirts, and the two of them ventured out towards the source of the red smoke. After a half-hour walk over the hilly terrain, they came upon a large imposing structure. It bore smokestacks and chimneys that scraped the flesh of the morning sky.