Tales of the Parodyverse

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Omar Karindu
Sat Jan 07, 2006 at 12:34:02 am EST
Subject
18 Months in the Making -- Zhang-He, Master of Feng Shui #1!
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[A curiously out-of-place studio apartment in Mangatown. A droning narrator signified by italics.]

Winter passes over the city as discarded socks might waft on the monoxide breezes of the highway. Unopened letters, "Final Payment" or "Default" red-stencilled on their blank faces, heap upon the well-positioned mahogany table next to cooling Lime and Shrimp Ramen. I do not read them, for the electricity is once more dicsonnected for nonpayment.

With a soft crunch, an armored boot alits from jet-powered flight on the tar-papered rooftop. If the body attached to that alighting foot by steel, hydraulics, and synechdoche had the inclination or the visual acuity to appreciate it, the scatter of flithy yet white snow against the nonreflective black might have proved an amusing contrast. Indeed, the white scattered against black, mottled by clots of slush tainted with the rocket exhaust from the nuclear microturbine thrusters in those boots (patent pending) might well have seemed a foreshadowing of the corruption of innocence that was the boot's synechdochically-attached body's master's intent in this grim mission.

A noise from above disturbs my tranquility in repositioning the bookshelf one centimeter to the west. Always, my movement is to the West, to this city and its poorly-laid-out studios, its clumsily placed Ikea divans. I long for a meaning so inscrutable I myself cannot express or understand it without laborious metaphor and analogy. But that is the way of...

******
Zhang-He, Master of Feng Shui #1
"Dolls on the Mantelpiece like Autumn Cherry Blossoms in an Ashtray: Fist of Rage, Credenza of Fury, Part I -- Fatal Title Length"
plot, script, and laborious narrative by Omar Karindu
art by Claude Garamond and William TimesNewRoman

During a fateful exchange student trip to Hong Kong, worthless slacker Braff Zackley lost his plane ticket and papers to an uncontrollable bong-based fire, "choosing" instead to study in a sequestered monastery. There, he learned the ancient wisdom and martial techniques for maximizing decor! But he also learned...EVIL from the ancient, heavily-licensed mastermind Man Fu! Now, his innocence yet intact (in more ways than one), he struggles to avoid his creditors as...Zhang-He, Master of Feng Shui!
******

The metallic footstep, its tread at once as heavy and sonorous as badly-played Wagner, faltered on the lightly-sleeted cornice, and what had been a measured stride instead collapsed into an impromptu glissande as an armored figure struggled with both the perilous rooftop and the unaerodynamic but dramatically-billowing cloak that defined its grandeur.

Beneath this drama of equilibrium paced a young man, perhaps twenty-five, of decent muscle tone and lean face, before a pile of bills and a bowl of cold Rame. The lean face was topped by unwashed dark auburn hair and the slender, tapering chin was set off by a scant soul patch, also dark auburn. As lissome as were the young man's movements, his stained robe and slightly worn ceremonial sash yet brushed against the table.

Aiiieeee! Again this floor plan conspires against me! How will I prepare against attack with walls that are not plumb! The hostel in Hong Kong was far superior; the rooms belonging to my master whom I have renounced and who has renounced me despite our constant references to and interaction with one another were as flesh made tensionless as water except its surface which is quite tense due to dipolar molecular structure! *Huff* Lety me now assume a stance of battle befitting Zhang-He!

He tensed. As if answering the director's cue in some lethal ballet, the armored figure crashed through the window, the late February afternoon keeping it artfully in silhouette as it found its footing and gestured dramatically towards the young man in question.

The figure in artifically-achieved darkness spoke: "Are you he who is called Zhang-He?"

"Yes." Zhang-He, now named, tensed further, risking cramp. He nudged the cheap dining table slightly and the cramp disappeared.

"Are you the former student of Man Fu?"

"Again, I must assent to that description." His eyes narrowed imperceptibly. He prepared for what was to come.

"Are you also he who is said to have mastered the art of Feng Shui?"

"Yes. It is an ancient technique. You will see that I have angled the chest beside the leaking radiator to maximum effect. Why do you intrude upon my carefully-decorated quarters, dramatically-lit one?"

"I have come to see one alleged to have escaped not only Man Fu, but also the legendary Omarindu, the notorious Fah So La, the infamous Ninjas of Khaji-Plaid, the famed lunatic monks of Terre Haute-Couture who attack one at a time no matter their numbers, the feared Occidental menace Black Gweilo, and the somewhat well-known fabric trafficker Ritz Velour."

"Then you have discerned nearly the correct location, but entered in the wrong manner."

"Nearly?" The cowled menace considered stepping into better view for a moment. "What do you mean by that?"

"I mean to learn your reason for intruding upon this economically-achieved harmony." Zhang-He cast a sidelong, envious glance at the thesaurus on the bookshelf. The stranger's head did not titl to follow the gaze.

Clearly, my foe thinks himself wise. And foe he must be; for he has not used the buzzer and can only have come for battle or repossession. Repossessors, stealthier than Quaalude-dosed cats, yet grasping and unstoppable as an aroused polar bear. How I despise them!

The armored figure smiled behind its ferrous mask, though Zhang-He could not have seen this, so carefully had his inquisitor staged his rupturous entry. "We will speak more if you..survive!"

And with a gesture, he raised one gauntleted hand and there blazed forth a feverish scintilla of deadly energy.

Zhang-He, having readied himself for the blast, swiftly flipped backwards, his left heel finding the Kitchenette oven's handle, his right pressing momentarily against the small windowpane at the oven door's center, before he sprung forward.

Like the tiger posing for a cereal box cover, I must convey determination and strength. My body is the tool of the furniture's arrangement. My soul is aligned with the molding. And he wastes his energy charging at an obscene angle, cutting against his own dragon line from the radiator. Now I strike!

The armored figure charged forward, blasting again, but too high to strike Zhang, who slid himself across the assembled unopened mail, somersaulted onto the shag before it, and then gracefully flipped once more to land a devastating kick on his opponent's midsection.

The armored adversary stumbled back, then grasped the foot of the martial arts aficionado.

His grip tells me more than he would wish about his technique. He will lose this clash, but is it not part of some greater design that --

The sudden pain as the cloaked man twisted his ankle broke Zhang-He's reverie, but the fighter was far from beaten,

""You have power, but I have a greater strength within me!"

The figure, still unrevealed for narrative purposes, paused for a moment to respond: "Your inner chi?"

"Yes -- I am at 45 degrees to the tasteful credenza that was my step-birthright as Man Fu's sole but now-renounced adopted!"

I summon the strength of its position, the might inherent in the manner by which it ties the room together, and my opponent's unwittingly awful placement of himself, of his akimbo limbs, in relation to the elements of my living space's stylization.

"Renounced? But I -- " But that was the only ejaulation the enemy had time for. A crushing blow to his stomach reduced the remainder ofg the sentence to a harsh mechanical sqwawk, as Zhang-He flipped backwards.

"As I suspected, you are no man but a mere touch of bric-a-brac! Exposed wire extrudes from your tinlike belly as would Play-Dough from a child's garish plastic pretend factory! Prepare to meet your end, kitschy one!"

Zhang shuffled his feet slowly on the carpet as he figure straightened itself, static intervening between its words as it replied.

"I -- shhhk -- I come to offer my alli -- shhhk -- my allianshhhhk --- my -- "

In truth, my words sting me even as they shatter for him. He has come only to test me, and I respond to his barrage of spectacular death-weaponry with simple violence? Yet, now that my soles have gathered electrons from the ambient energy of the room and its Dacron-blend floor-covering, the moment of decision is passed. Truly it is as my renounced but ever-mentioned master warned, that when the moment comes and the room is best arranged, the blow is a consequence of the universe and not of our illusory egos.

And then he swiftly, yet almost tenderly thrust forth his index fingers at the exposed wiring. A huge blue spark, the scent of just-compounded ozone, and the squeal of microphone feedback briefly filled the dinette/living room. The robot, for robot it was, spasmed and then hunched, its motor circuitry thoroughly shorted-out.

"Can you yet speak, proxy machine? Or will I move you into the rear East corner as a conversation piece?"

This perfunctory battle has ended, and as if unfeeling, I already plot to restore myself by meditation on some hipsterish design. Yet must I learn who has gopne to the trouble of arranging this game of death, deceit, and mechanical engineering merely to speak to one so humble yet verbose as myself. But for all its florid speech, how cold the world its stilled body makes when positioned, as if in the matching card game of memory, to the one I knew for those few months in my spiritual home of Hong Kong where I took my vow of celibacy. And now, so ironic that I penetrate this fleshless box of plastic which expulses an unrefracted power with the profligacy of a venture capitalist.

Though eerily unmoving, the machine yet emitted vocaliations.

I have at the least recalled more from Roget's.

"Shhhk -- I come as an envoy of one you may not recognize, of one like yourself. For I am a creation in the form and the service of the brilliant and, like you, unfairly isolated --"

"Peter von Doom!" The voice came from behind this time, and as Zhang-He looked back and forth with bewilderment, a majestically cloaked armored figure, his ever step brimming with the confidence that the apartment, unlike the roof, was not slippery with melting winter precipitation, entered through the door which, Zhang-He now realized, had been unlocked for over a day. "Or rather, two of his Peter von Doombots, using licensed technology. But my reputation and fame, like my simulacra, precede me."

He walks with the purposefulness of one who has never allowed himself the luxury of a break in discipline nor succumbed to the rhythm of a pulsing samba beat with a sweat-gleaming cabana boy in a Venezualan resort. Yet he is not a 'he,' but an 'it,' a thing made to walk and move as would a man, and to speak and posture as would an educated man.

"Your contrivance impresses my senses yet offends my sense of fashionable accoutrement, von Doom."

"My apologies, but you understand that I had to see your skill and wisdom in action. I am a man who weds action to wisdom myself, and welds, as you have seen, power to intellect."

"And satin to steel. But you could not fool one who knows the harmonous conflict of the universe, the rapprt between the ever-churning tides of pulsing life and the coolo and rigidly geometrical alignment of a bedroom set with the rising and falling of the stars, for long. As soon as you entered, I sensed that no living thing could have produced so tacky an effect on the room's currents of life energy as that other von Doombot."

"You are indeed wise."

He says this, and I flash back to a moment of meeting -- Man Fu speaking to me, half a year ago, in China.

[China.]

Man Fu's venerable body strode forth, and his respectable words slipped from chapped old lips like playful salmon striving against a waterfall.

"You come to learn Feng Shui, to seek my license, to gain a design you had not before? Your check has cleared. I must only ask you -- why have you climbed the freezing mountainside with the flower of attainment you were asked to bring? Why have you not instead rented a car, and driven via the scenic drive?"

The auburn-haired young man, his youth and innocence betrayed by his unadorned, hairless chin, only bowed his head and said softly, "I come to learn from Man Fu the arts of decor and the wisdom of well-chosen furniture."

"But why have you chosen so hard a path by which to find these things, so formidable a master? Why climb rather than find a chauffeur?"

"Because -- "

Yes?"

"Because here in Hong Kong there is no mountain but the one we build for ourselves, as your contractors built using your accumulated license fees, venerable Man Fu."

Man Fu's improbably bushy eyebrows arched, and he stroked his still more improbably long mustache.

"You are indeed wise."

Only later would Man Fu's evil become clear to me, as his belief in harmony soon grew to justify anything -- violence, coercion, murder, even increased licensing fees until his name brand was as empty as what had been his soul. But von Doom is wiating for me to speak to him again, and I must respond here and now.

"Your grammar is nearly as impeccable as my own. But why have you assaulted me! Why do you stage this blow at the heart of what I have made a most humble yet well-comported life-space?"

"I come because of a menace to both of us, a menace to whom you owe not the germ of those skills but their first impediment!"

"You cannot mean -- "

"Yes! Ritz Velour!

"The Frotteurist? He who would slay by the caress over clothing, who wishes no more trhan the sale of silks, opiates, and 19th-century stereotypes of an ethnicity not his own?"


"So unlike you, that you must clash or become one another. If I understand your...erm...'Eastern wisdom' correctly."

"You are indeed wise, von Doom. And I accept your offer of alliance...for now."

And I think now of my parents, how they long for me to take on employment. I accept. knowing that this is also not a true master and in anticipation of the minor ethical conflict to come. But to stop Ritz Velour I would deal with devils and attorneys. Von Doom's robot attempts to grin and fails, then beckons me follow. What is to come, even I am not sure....

TO BE CONTINUED.....



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