Nightmares Nos. 2 & 3
No. 2
The house is now dark.
He looks around and sees the outlines of the frames of all the family pictures – on the wall unit shelves that hold the big TV, on the lamp tables, and on the walls. Over the fireplace mantel is a large gold-framed print of a painting showing the traumatic baptism of pagan Kyivan Rus in the Dnipro River in the 10th century by Prince Volodymyr. On the mantel is a model of a 19th century British clipper ship – the Cutty Sark – and toys from Zippy’s childhood – little tin horses and plastic monkeys. Mounted on the brickwork over the fireplace is an antique smoothbore flintlock musket from the time of the American Revolution given to Zippy’s father as a gift by a man he knows in Virginia. Why is his father such an important man?
Amphibious attack. These words repeat in Zippy’s head. What do they mean? Amphibious attack… amphibious attack – he used to know as a child and he remembers screaming them in play as he ran around the house, to the great annoyance of his father and saint-like patience of his mother.
There is a movie playing on the TV. He doesn’t know if it is the TV showing the movie or one of his parents’ hundreds of VHS videotapes. He decides from the corny music and the cheap photography that it is one of those nighttime light situation comedy soaps so popular in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. He can’t come up with the name for the one playing, but acts in his mind as though he knows exactly which one it is, so no one would suspect him of not being in control.
The show pans across the lush, warm-breeze-blown palms of some exotic island lapped by blue ocean waters. There are a group of goofy uncertain tourists looking for something and they come to a cave.
But they go no farther and disappear among their scheduled activities – on some other island, as it were – as Zippy wakes, exhausted, in the cave and desperately tries to remember where he is and how he got there.
He sees the entrance to the cave, filled by a line of sand, a line of water, and a line of sky, but it is far off, and something tells him that no amount of crawling toward it would free him. A few moves forward on his knees proves the point, bringing the ceiling of the cave lower and lower, narrowing the passage out to impassible – especially for him, given his fatness. He is suffocating. In a feverish panic, from his back, he frantically kicks his legs up and claws at the ground with his fingers to get back to the small rotunda where he had awoken.
He now recalls he’s on a desert island and suddenly feels a terrible hunger gnawing at his entrails.
Mercifully, a long table, which is the table from Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper”, is set with a magnificent feast of sundry dishes and meats. The apostles are somewhere out there but they do not want to come in – and that’s just fine with Zippy. He will eat and drink their food.
But as he is about to reach the table, a skylight, which he has just noticed, covering a hole in the ceiling of the cave, bursts with a violent crash, sending shards of glass spilling into his skin, and through the sunlit opening an army of ferociously chattering Ferret monkeys rain down large rocks on Zippy, knocking him unconscious.
When he comes to, he looks up to find a terrifying white horse standing over him, but as frightening as the horse is, something about it inspires hope. Zippy looks up to see the faces of Ferret monkeys peering down at him from the hole, grinning but mostly silent, except for internecine arguing among themselves, keeping watch to make sure Zippy does not reach the table.
As Zippy moves back from under the horse, a man on the horse grows into view, his sagging old man’s jowls pointing down at Zippy. Like Captain Bligh, he is wearing an 18th century sea captain’s uniform and hat. A smug confident look plays on his thin red lips, which Zippy doesn’t like, and Zippy immediately thinks that he will unseat the man and take his horse. He remembers the man to be Josh Davies, but does not remember the name sufficiently to be able to say it, so he makes believe he does, thinking he has fooled the man into hearing his name spoken by Zippy. He believes this will make the man more amenable to his pleas.
“But how did you get into this cave with a horse,” Zippy asks, as though in innocent, naïve awe.
“Oh, I have my ways. I don’t concern myself with trifles.”
Zippy contrives a pleading look with his face to gain the man’s trust and, he hopes, his help – to get him out of the cave and away from The Ferret monkeys, so that he can finally eat. After that, he will kill the old man and take his horse.
Zippy is secretly thrilled to see his ploy working. What looks like compassion comes into the old man’s eyes. The old man bends over the side of his horse and extends a hand toward Zippy, so that, Zippy thinks, he can pull him up onto the horse.
But as the old man grasps Zippy’s hand firmly in his own, instead of pulling him up, he fixes him to the spot. Out comes the other hand from behind his back. He lifts the shovel high above his head, takes careful aim, and with gritted teeth crashes it against the front of Zippy’s head. Glass from his glasses enters his eyes.
No. 3
Now there are a lot of situation comedies on the TV. In one of them, Jerry Seinfeld is walking very quickly back and forth in a crouched position like Groucho Marx making jokes about Ukraine being part of Russia, his head seemingly coming out of the screen, and there’s Zippy, inside the show too, laughing at Jerry and making his own jokes, competing with the character George for Jerry’s attention, and competing with George to be George, and they get into a tussle. But, ha, ha, it is only good-natured play. Yet George has gotten serious, hurting Zippy physically, and is becoming more fierce and aggressive, and it scares him. He knows the only thing that can save him is to prove to George that they are on camera and part of a show being watched by millions of people, and as he begins explaining to George that it is all in fun, the ferocious look on George’s face turns into a smile with especially shiny teeth of several rows going far back into his mouth, and they both start to talk about coming from Queens, as if they share the same past.
But really, on the inside, Zippy burns with hatred for George, for George immediately showed an animal ferocity in protecting himself, his identity, and his interests against Zippy, which hadn’t allowed Zippy to take George’s things, which Zippy thinks he should have been able to. He hates George, utterly, for his successful resistance – a resistance, moreover, that seemed laughably easy for George to put up. George, of all people – George! Inside, Zippy is filled with indignation and rages that he could not take someone else’s things and that he had been so easy to defeat. He would have to come back – and he would come back – and show him later. No one was going to stop him from getting the things that he wanted. He was going to win all situations, everywhere, in everything.
But meanwhile, on with the show.
“Your horse is here,” George suddenly utters, as Jerry stands aside in ad-libbed disbelief and the audience breaks into a roar of laughter. The line was unscripted and unrehearsed, and yet it is the funniest line of the season.
It is a game of one-upmanship, of George not only showing that he is the stronger, but doing his utmost to rub Zippy’s face in it – in front of all the people – who are laughing at him – laughing – at Zippy’s expense!
The line means more than one thing. It not only means that a terrifying white horse has arrived and, though unseen, is waiting outside, but that for a head, Zippy has a cow’s with horns, as if that had always been his head and as if, for the huge audience watching the show, George’s stating the obvious is just the funniest thing. Through the cow’s head, Zippy hears the laughter. The smug look on George’s face suggests he’s really pleased with the double meaning of his joke at Zippy’s expense, which, judging by the laughter of the audience, had been understood in both its senses.
He is sitting in the dark on the leather couch watching the show in his parents’ living room. The parents are frightened of their son with the cow’s head. His father is convinced that the head is fused to Zippy’s head underneath and is now a permanent part of it – impossible to tear away. Their son has become a monster.
“You look like a Jew, you look like a Jew,” the mother, shaking her arms frantically, yells shrilly at the father, who bows his head in a sort of resigned dejection, takes the Bible from the wall unit and heads for the garage den. She has done this not to insult the father, but to protect him from the son.
In physical and psychological pain, Zippy has now begun to low and moo – deeply, insanely.
“I can do nothing, I can do nothing,” Zippy’s hysterical mother cries as she remains frozen in terror and aging in the hallway, as other lowing and mooing, mixed with blood-curdling though heartrending screams are heard out of the far bedroom at the end of the long house, where Zippy’s wife has just given birth to a son with a horned cow’s head.
Zippy does not know how his Ukrainian wife had gotten there, but he decides he must forget about her and his new cow child and leave her and go back to Ukraine to find another wife and start over again – somehow, he thinks, doing this, and having another child by the new wife, will mean finally getting the cow’s head off.
He is at the airport and on the plane and then he is in the newsroom of the Kyiv Poster.
“Yes, I can do superior work as a journalist, and as an editor – I’m a great writer overall. I do political coverage for the investment bank. But I really want to work here, but please help me get off this head,” on his knees he begs a bumbling dumpy inept horse-looking figure, who seems, nevertheless, to have attained a position of some respect and authority within the news organization.
As soon as the figure helps him, Zippy thinks, he will take his job.
“Oh, um, okay,” the dopey incompetent figure says, taking Zippy by the horns, and pulling at them.
“Ow – ooooowww!!! Zippy screams, as the figure becomes a terrifying white horse, neighing wildly and rearing up over him.
Over and again the horse comes down with tremendous force on the insides of and between the horns, ramming them outward with the pasterns and hooves of his front legs, but only managing to rip them out of Zippy’s head by miniscule fractions. Streams of blood flow down on the inside of the cow’s head and flood Zippy’s eyes behind glasses that he had not been able to remove because they have also been encased inside the cow’s head.
“AAAAAAAHHH… AAAAAAAHHH… AAAAAAAHHHHH…!!!”
“You should not have stomped all over me and told me I was in your way,” says an indignant and hurt Pony Boy, as he brings his pasterns down against the horns yet once again.
Filed by Jack Step, for Eat at Mack’s, December 22, 2013