…and Zippy Zamazda’s agony
The big media vices consulting office at Penmanship, International, high inside a modern building overlooking a posh district of Kyiv, awaits him, but he does not go.
He does not pop up early in the morning from his warm bed before the alarm clock goes off and declaim, ‘Errr-righty-dighty’ and ‘Nyoog-nyag-nyaooo…’ and rush his formerly fire-hydrant-shaped ice-cream-man body on bandied legs to thrust his walleyes encased in a pedophile’s impatient snorting pink pig face into the large sumptuous interior of his professional lair to plan the next step of his rise to Number One.
He does not order his sandwiches or Chinese food delivered or charge one of his two secretaries with making the coffee – to be ready and percolating when he arrives.
For now those dreams – which he’d schemed so painstakingly to cobble, sometimes concocting them with the complicity of The Ferret, in the days when that furry attractive boy would say things like, ‘I didn’t tell you that,’ or ‘You didn’t hear it from me,’ or “Dude, dude,’ or simply, ‘Heh-heh-heh’ – were shattered.
Or were they?
Before his physical misfortune at the hands of the murderous A. Plumb – once the newspaper-loincloth-attired Animal Boy of tooth-scraped McDonald’s cheeseburger wrappers and local tourist terror – the Penmanship, International office had been nearly the apex of everything Welsh Losser had once set out to gain.
Now he heard that Penmanship office laughing at him, mocking him – yes, the very office itself – across the ever-widening gulf of darkening space through which, every day, Welsh Losser would crawl farther and farther away.
Where he’d go, he himself did not know, ducking into archways and the corridors formed by the cold indifference of modern business centers built like mausoleums and morgues, now so often exhausted, slumping against their walls for rest and recuperation.
The doctors told Welsh Losser there was nothing they could do to fix him, but that any attempt ran the very high risk of severing his nerves and turning him into a vegetable.
Thus, Welsh Losser lurches forward and about, adjusting against his will his once pudgewobble-happy gait to a newly crooked spine, which has made his shoulders severely uneven and given his back a hump. His newly gained deformity is too extreme to be correctable by Photoshop or airbrushing of images he’d post of himself on Amazon Kindle – when his physique had somehow been always magically improving – next to his self-published writing achievements – for the fools to marvel at.
He sees the Gothic cathedral across the street reflected in the glass of the death buildings on former Red Army Street (he can’t remember what it’s called now), not far, as a matter of fact, from where Josh Davies officially lives, and he is drawn to it, inexorably.
He plays the great pipe organ in the church – a colossal talent he did not know he had.
Between pumps of the pedals he’s pushing under fat pointing feet, he decides to turn and look over his lower shoulder, and say bitterly, with a new rasping sinister snarl, to no one, except perhaps an imaginary audience reading the exiled Jack Step’s story in Kyiv Unedited:
“Why has this happened to me? Why couldn’t it have happened to someone else? It all has before. I always got away with it. Others were made to suffer, deservedly, because of my self-promoting machinations to reach the top, and there was no reason why that shouldn’t go on until I die. But now this. Why me? Why, nyag, why, why…”
Welsh Losser resumes playing. He laughs and the notes rise up – the sound becomes deafening – to fill the cathedral’s soaring vaults and arches. Welsh Losser laughs and laughs as he plays, his crooked shoulders and his pointy fat feet and his hump roll in a grotesque rhythm; his music turns demonic.
As he plays, Welsh Losser thinks of interiors – of the big office that has forsaken him, of the cathedral, but it slowly dawns on him, as he rolls and plays and laughs and shakes, that all that is superficial twaddle; he slowly starts to realize the only interior that counts is the one inside his head.
Just then, as he stops playing for a moment, he again peers over his lower shoulder, this time somewhat apprehensively, and sees the clouded light come in from the street through the cathedral’s opening doors.
At first, he but sees the shadow of a figure that seems to have a short man’s fat body (fatter than his own) and a head that looks like a cow. But alas, as the strange figure approaches, the cow’s head proves true.
Zippy Zamazda stops before Losser and extends a hand from his fat torso toward him, and in the hand is a resume.
Losser takes the paper with a smirk. He notes the giant head straining to remain erect, continuously wobbling backward and jerking forward from the monstrous weight of the preposterous horns. This greatly pleases Losser.
“Please, Mr. Welsh Losser,” Zamazda says. “I would be proud to be a member of your human vices PR consulting media writing team.”
“Yes,” Losser says with a cruel rasp, “I can see by your credentials – ah, Zippy, is it? – that you might just make a fine addition toward my purposes.”
“Oh, really,” replies Zamazda. “Gee, Mr. Welsh Losser, that’s great!”
But Zippy Zamazda cannot stand Welsh Losser. He is enraged by Losser’s smarmy, arrogant response. And he so covets that one moment – when he, for just a second, throws his head back and curls his upper lip while looking through his glasses and down his nose at his opponent in a nonpareil display of savage contempt – but he is denied it by the cow’s head.
The cow’s head, the fact of it, its constant presence, its great weight, its imprisonment of Zamazda, is endless torment. He cannot pry or cut or tear it off; each time he tries, the cow’s head grows tighter around his face and heavier on his neck.
But the worst torment of all is the complete futility of Zamazda’s rage, for the cow’s head has made the expression of his matchless arrogance utterly senseless, hiding it, taking his freedom of contempt, and therefore his ubiquitous physical display of his great love for himself (the fat of his neck shaking in defiance), away.
All he has are eye holes, through which he has no choice but to plead – his eyes being the only features of his face now visible. His glasses are still on – trapped with the rest of his fat face inside the giant leather head.
“But please, Mr. Welsh Losser,” Zamazda says, “if you are going to hire me, then at least first take this cow’s head off that you put on my head.”
“I,” exclaims Welsh Losser, greatly befuddled but amused, enjoying Zamazda’s constant struggle immensely. “But I have no recollection of ever putting it on.”
And Welsh Losser is right, for while he is experiencing his own torments in real time, he had only fitted Zippy Zamazda with the cow’s head in one of Zamazda’s three nightmares from which he’s been damned by Ferret Light Aqua Fresh to never awaken, while his aging wife sits over him in their bed, waiting in graying, wrinkling grief for the body of her still living husband, also growing older, and emaciated, to arise.
Smiling to himself, watching Zippy Zamazda’s wobbling head, Welsh Losser thinks of testicles, and of whetting the big knife.
Filed by Jack Step, for Plato’s Cave Quarterly, November 18, 2013