Saturday, January 3, 2009

PENNYFARTHING

Marvin Allison could channel surf from ten yards away. Christ, he could do it with his eyes closed. Beer in the cup holder of his folding canvas lawn chair, bag of pretzels propped up against one of the legs, this was his battleground. The battle against boredom. And it was no match for him and his TV.

He surfed through all the channels, even the highly specialized ones, only stopping briefly on those with a greater chance of nudity. And through all the clicking, he managed to predict the plotlines of all the shows with amazing accuracy.

The only programs he didn’t enjoy were sports related. They were harder to predict by their nature. His accuracy fell to about sixty percent when deciding the outcomes of sporting events. Not a high enough accuracy level to lay money down, and the dialogue was mostly incidental, with none of the glimpses of real life conversation captured in scripted television.

Marvin sat back in his seat, sifting backwards through the thirties, Showcase, MMM, TLC, CNN, A&E, when he caught out of the corner of his eye a distracting flash of white light beaming from his brick fireplace.

The phenomenon lasted for perhaps less than a second, but it was enough to mess up his whole surfing timetable. When the light hit its apex, a mustachioed man in a dull gray suit on a pennyfarthing, crashed violently in his palm-smeared far wall.

Marvin was stuck on channel 31 for almost as many seconds. It was all in all, one big unscheduled disaster. He'd get back to surfing, he decided, after this short break. He promised himself he wouldn't go anywhere.

***

“I already know how this is going to end,” Marvin said, tending the bewildered man’s head wounds, “just put a cold beer on that bump, there. It’s going to end in one of two ways.

“Obviously, what's happened here is you've traveled through some sort of rip in the very fabric of time." He belched great ripples up his esophagus, then continued, "Something has wrenched you from your rightful and natural home. From the look of your style of dress and mode of transportation, I'd say you come from some time around the turn of the last century. Some powerful force was at work here, and I've got no idea how to send you back. I've got a pretty strong link-up to my satellite provider, so that may have something to do with what brought you here, but I'm not a scientist," he rested his beer on the shag carpet, "so I won't speculate on such matters. But my calculation for the outcome of this program is as follows: There’s a twenty percent chance you’re going to go to some kind of historical society, a museum, or university or whatever that specializes in your time period, and be ridiculed as a hoaxer or crazy nut after which you will die most likely either in a ..." he stretched out this bit really emphasizing his mental prowess in the field of prognostication, "... mental hospital or in some back alley, penniless.”

“My, oh my," the man with the pennyfarthing said.

“Yeah, but, I’d say there’s an eighty percent chance you’ll catch some new disease that you have no natural defense against and die within 48 hours.”

“Oh dear.”

“You haven’t even been hit with the influenza epidemic where you came from, have you?”

“Epidemic?” the man from the rip in time said groggily, "I don't remember that."

“You would, pal. Face it, one way or another, you’re history.”

And now, Marvin thought, back to my regular scheduled programs. He settled back into his lawnchair with his remote. Marvin was nothing if not a good adjuster.

***

Alfred (the man’s name was), had struck a deal with Marvin. Marvin dusted off his matching lawn chair from the back of the crawl space and now had a TV companion. Alfred was endlessly fascinated by the pictures, but endlessly baffled by the unrealistic situations blaring at him from the set. Also, it was impossible to follow the programs blazing by. But, he was a good student, and put his astonishment aside, for his true purpose was to study the ways of men of the future.

As a man of honor and some good-standing where he had come from, Alfred wanted to pay Marvin back for his hospitality, despite the fact that the food from the future was largely unfit to eat. Even the vegetables had given him terrifying bouts of diarrhea at first. But, Alfred was a good adapter too and after a short time, feeling slightly acclimatized, found a job as an actor at Fort Michlin, which had been turned into a kind of museum. Though the air still made him cough until he was hoarse in the throat, it wasn’t enough to hold back his charm during the interview.

***

The thing that struck Marvin as most strange, while he was out on his daily chores, was how he had been wrong about what was coming. Were his instincts not as sharply attuned as they once were? Maybe he wasn’t paying enough attention. No. He decided that the thing was, he had a routine going, a damn fine routine and that blinding white flash was the thing what ended it.

So, that’s all it takes to ruin a good routine, he thought. That’s it, just a millisecond. From now on, I’m doubling my effort. I’m sleeping on the chair. I want to know what happens, goddammit, I want to be sure.

The strain of mental ranting made Marvin cough violently. He was feverish, delirious. Why hadn’t he noticed until just now? He noticed he had been coughing when he visited his mother and went to the bank, the supermarket, but it hadn’t been that bad. When he got his coughing under control, he went to the bathroom mirror and found his palm was covered in thick dark red mucuous, his face was covered in bumps.

***

When Alfred came home from work, he found Marvin curled up in his chair, huddled in a blanket. Only his head and right hand, with the remote control were visible.

“Alfred,” he said, “what’s happened to me? I’m sick as a dog. I can’t stop coughing and I’ve got the worst case of the shits.”

“Hm,” Alfred said, “that’s funny. I was just getting over that. But, they were working on a cure for the Dennison virus when I left the 24th Century for the future, they must have found a cure for that by now.”

2 comments:

benzo369 said...

Oh my what a picturesque story. Kind of vanilla, though.

Anonymous said...

"As a man of honor and some good-standing where he had come from, Alfred wanted to pay Marvin back for his hospitality, despite the fact that the food from the future was largely unfit to eat. Even the vegetables had given him terrifying bouts of diarrhea at first. But, Alfred was a good adapter too and after a short time, feeling slightly acclimatized, found a job as an actor at Fort Michlin, which had been turned into a kind of museum. Though the air still made him cough until he was hoarse in the throat, it wasn’t enough to hold back his charm during the interview."

-i don't know why, but i love this paragraph