The Incredible Shrinking Man landed a date with a dust mite. Dinah, her name. The drive-in their destination. A real horror show – triple bill bloodfest. The Shrinking Man wore a plaid leisure suit designed under an electron microscope. Dinah shoeless and barelegged in her own godgiven gnarly coat.
In the dark of the seat theyhad hardly begun to bill and coo, when through the open passenger window bumped the Invisible Man; who had himself been downsized – through the uncertainty principle – to slave in a Minnie Mouse subsidiary of a microchip factory; a kinda Jimminy Cricket alphabet omega point sweatshop. It was Friday night – he was free, escaped, high on freon ion laced with too much pion; up for whatever wormhole.
A sucker for dandruff, drawn by smell alone, Dinah fell for his head. Jealousy swept over the Shrinking Man like Nazis over the 1941 steppes.
Through the windshield, up on the screen, inside a jail cell, a lunatic devoured a bat. A secret that hinged on prior knowledge he could not – due to shock – express drove him crazy. A hopeless actor in his late fifties, he actually was appropriately cast. The live bat also looked terrified, insane, very likely – in reality – in hell. But cut to – as the maniac prepares to bite off a wing – the papier-mache; although soundtrack continues tortured squeals.
Embarrassed by the seams of the fakery, I stared down into my lap at the abandoned hand, Dinah now absorbed with the I. M.
I…? My hand?
Holy Carlos Castanets – I was dreaming!
Focused on a crablike mole on the back of my flip finger. Hey – I was in charge. I could deal with this. But… once God – what do? Well, what you want. Although, watch it: because want also means lack.
Oh… why not trade paradox for a pair of socks that match?
I looked back up on the vast screen. Some guy – dead ringer for Yours Dreaming – was doing Dinah. Enjoying her rottweiler style. And this dude was anything but shrinking; although he was, yeh, incredible. Ecstatically Dinah’s ovoid body jittered. I sat back to gloat in glee – someone, oh someone I know, is in the kitchen. Scrunching expectantly on the vinyl behind the wheel, I unexpectedly spotted, in the August twilight between the windshield and the screen, a lightning bug patrol. On and off – through chartreuse bio-glow – in remorseless code the bugs implied God disported not alone.
I glanced down over to my right. Saw no one. Closed door, rolled-down window. Microbus parked alongside, kids conceivably in the back doing the expected. Well… of course: I had put Dinah up on the screen – created a star.
Then back up to the two-dimensional action my eye creeped. Something hinted something up there not right. Meticulously, God – ignoring electric beetle floaters – recalled X-ray vision. Flipped a switch; powered up the old metaphysical mechanism. Thereby to reveal my beloved’s mouth part grommeted around the Invisible Man’s unmentionable.
I – God in this goddamn dream – was sharing the mystery of the other – who (my heart hoped) likewise treasured that mystery in my own person – with a see-through figment. And the horror horripilated when the I. M. squeaked in his dog whistle soprano, “Hey – ya wanna switch?”
I froze. Consciousness – in selfdefense – down a chute skated out onto the rink of Genesis.
A member of the neighboring tribe had raped Dinah. Her kinsmen visited the tribe nextdoor. Discussed with their leaders the incident. At length agreed – bygones, bye-bye. But let’s hitch the kids. Legally. Meaning first, for all the males in this new family being welcomed into our family, the trifle of circumcision. A gesture entailing no strings; absolutely no religious commitment; no more traumatic than paring the nails on the way to the chapel. Besides, you’ll notice the disappearance of cheese; plus that much easier to rid yourself of crabs.
After trading yuks about icepicks, sledgehammers, dynamite, battery acid, lye – they spat into their palms; shook on it.
“Here’s to,” the neighbor chief pronounced, “among neighbors peace.”
Piece o’ ass o’ my sister, the head Jew thought, smiling.
The chief returned the smile. The Hebrew broadened his, encouraging his neighbor to think it a sheer gladface.
They sent over, swift as thought, Dr. Jekyll and his nurse Annabelle Lee to get each and everyone of the fellas properly peeled. Pretty painless – or, rather, ugly painless – at first. Till the local, which had been so discreetly administered, wore off.
Ow! Ow! The boys – to a man – forgot booty; ditched the whole sex kaboodle. Layed back carefully. Allergic to the very idea of pee. Dr. J. and his sidekick Lee muttered on the way out everybody might, for the next seventy-two hours, wanna take it easy.
Next day, when God began to up on the screen thaw, the Chosen creeped nextdoor. Drew snickeringly their swords, and ran through the lot; every neighbor boy still lying around whistling Dixie with his dick in a sling.
God found Himself focusing down on my shadowy self behind the wheel in the obscure car parked between that microbus and a phantom Galaxie. Jacob’s offspring meanwhile go nuts – pillage, loot, burn; enslave the women, skewer the children; exult in dishing out cold revenge. The whole story waxes perverse, actually. So I lost myself gazing up instead at my double. One of us directing him and/or me to re-engage in the ongoing recreational sex.
Dinah hunched in my lap. I in turn sat on a rhinestone-studded throne. While, facing me, the I. M. stood snaking her esophagus. It was still too much. Sobbing, I buried my chin in her dorsal integument. Lustily – as she fell to cowboying my scepter – the suckers and barbs impregnating her hindmost legs gripped my thighs; entwined shins; stabbed, pinched ankles. The remaining four limbs of my faithless siren held the Invisible Man the way a briar patch steadies in a gust an armload of cellophane.
Revisiting fully now the thorny present, I at last booted up through consciousness into vocalization: “Dah-dah-dah dah-di-dah… Omicron Kappa… OK!”
Air currents attested he was nodding in reply (X-ray vision kicking in and out – interference from fireflies!) He withdrew from the anterior of her GI, or so I presumed from the slurp. She then unhitched, uncurled her sticky, juicy legs; waddled off my pelvis.
I got up. Turned around.
Quick as jitterbug chairs the transparent cad occupied the throne; Dinah settled stat onto his lucid unit. Next staccatoed the scritchy suck of her legs enwrapping his own femurs, tibias, tarsals.
After, however, a few desultory humps, she paused midstroke to reach down and pick up off the floor a flake of rotten skin; next to it something chitonous – spider pedipalp piece, cootie cuticle, flea knuckle, maybe vintage flywing chip. Hard to ascertain, as I was peering out through tears of jealousy, tears of lechery, tears of oh-hell-let’s-get-it-over-with.
When she had done with her snack, into her clothespin yap I jimmied my johnson. To the hilt she swallowed. Bobbed too deep, in fact – so game my little Dinah. I pulled out, just as she regurgitated a spurt bristly with termite mica, pinworm egg, cockroach stalk, plus numerous choice moldy dandruff chunks.
The set – a 1929 brothel made over into a Cheops throne room – began to stink like a sweatsock mortuary. But she hopped to it. A promising hausfrau, Di gobbled back up the regurgitate. Then blindly resought my crotch, poised a micron above her seated form.
I gaped down the upturned snorkel of her esophagus. She seemed OK. Dah-dah-dah dah-di-dah. Dinah was mute. Didn’t have any eyes; her kind don’t. Two good reasons figured I could always trust Dinah. Till tonight. Our first date. God – a threeway, on the first!
And I wondered if maybe back in the Pentateuch the original Dinah had been a mite…
A couple token ruts – as if she were having difficulty backing into the parking slot of the I. M…. then Dinah again stooped to conquer another bite down on the highpile rug.
Drifting back to rumination… if the original Dinah were a mite complicit…
Consider: the circumcision joke got played on the neighbors because their guy had defiled sister Di. Sometimes it takes two to defile. At least two...
Sure enough, when Dinah cranked her head back up, she held in her outerspace kisser one of her very own shitballs. Greedily she clutched the enzyme-wrapped goodie. Slammed back down on the Invisible Man with renewed intensity.
Well, OK: I am God. Godman. I mean, I’m God, man – this is my dream. And I’m a man, so God thinks manly. I’m not really a sexcrazed homophobic misogynistic racist closet god. Just in my wildest dreams.
The Genesis Dinah persisted to bug me. The text eschews rape; says
instead violate. Christ, she probably violated the poor goy – you know how aggressive Jewish gals get.
I mean, I could see the I. M. violating Dinah. Bombed on theoretical drugs. Probably his job at that quantum factory; collapsed his ghost world; waved moral probability clear off the map. No doubt about it, guys like that – especially when you don’t see them around – rape all the time. They should be castrated. Locked up. Killed at least once a week.
But if the poor neighbor goy was a guy like me… when I’m not playing God… Who is after all no goy at all… Jewish as they come…
Smelled, out of nowhere, subterranean tidepool – like a school of transparent cave fish just finished finning away from grabby spelunkers. Fish sweat… exertion persp…
The I. M. broke into bugles relegating pleasure to the bathos of fecal materialism. I felt icky, as if participating in the orgasm of a poltergeist.
Ah… down here below in the mini-micro anything goes. Logic no more particular than a shredder. Consistency the path to the trash compactor.
Twisted thoughts back to the visible:
The shitball looked big enough to golf with. And not unlike a ruptured golfball, it was unraveling – protruding strings of poop; stuck to her hot lips, queued up to follow the train of nourishment already oozing down her gullet.
I sniffed, from where I stood, the bouquet – cankered violets, ethyl mercaptan, gangrene, fungal tangerine; with a glow of nitre, suggesting a probable Clorox finish. Swelling my alveoli with this multifaceted asafetida, I grew soused with arousal. Approached mesmerically my straining member to her foodhole. Then – bingo! – remembered:
In the Big World, these dung pellets – which Dinah and her tribe traditionally excrete with the intent of returning to later for just such serendipitous treats – when inhaled into human lungs become allergens. No – this no innocent shitball; this the vector of asthma, pneumonia, TB – cancer?
Fear entombed perfume. Into the vacuum hissed ozone. This what I wanted? Well, I did lack the romance of cancer; asthma kinda sexy, too… but what if I catch a virus make my dick fall off? Hey – Carlos could go cast a net elsewhere.
I next appeared all zipped up back down in the car. Alone. Up on the screen blood flew, as a Frankenstein knockoff chainsawed the Invisible Man; the script making his blood – and now even gaudy gobbets of guts – visible in glistening color. The Fly – adorned with the head of the Incredible Shrinking Man – squealed off the wall into the tornado of gore.
Regarded in my lap my hand. Intoned softly to everyone in particular, “I am realing. This is real. This really is my hand.”
I lit a cigarette. Scrunched around on the vinyl. Out of pocket hoisted keys. Switched on ignition. Hit lights. Snapped off emergency. Prepared to blow this popsicle stand.
Twisted around – Camel dangled from lip – make sure nobody behind. Nobody was. Found reverse.
For a moment – just an iffy jiffy – I felt debonair, free as a mitochrondrion, light as a chromosome, in my 1958 four-door Bel Air; and it was, sure, Dinah belting, “See the USA in your Chevrolet!”
And while backing out, gentling through argyle sock and alligator Wegian the pedal – in the back of my head the Invisible Man falsettos, “Hey – ya wanna switch?”
Dah-dah-dah Lah-di-dah – we all disappear on the old banjo.
