—[when we worship an elder deity, we befriend the ungodly]—

Woodrow Wilson Panaflex, sporting a pith helmet, leads what he considers his advance party along a segment of the Little Tiber reverting to a ramrod drainage ditch; the troop’s skulls are targeted by poison darts from Cultist blowguns. Primitive bolt weapons. “These people will do anything to preserve their way of life,” he says a bit too loudly, with the Consecration Community Center visible just over the next tiny incline. He commands Mr. Stimplerum-Clickskin to halt along the riverbank. They stare at each other for a long moment, in what Qui thinks to be some form of telepathy. “Now, then, Ms. Bush-Bush Bush, quote why do we see this negative unquote correlation?” Panaflex’s boyish skin lacks the rivulets of age, and so the tall man furrows his proxy brow.

Drain
By Davis Schneiderman
Northwestern University Press 

Bush-Bush taps the side of her legs, “Umma-Segnus, the World Worm, remains a formidable absence in this region. We admit as much. Yet this Quadrilateral town, Mr. Pana!ex, is the first to possess its own everything: a water supply independent from Quadrilateral. A location atop the old Venus Flytrap settlement. They Cultists think Fulcrum Maneuvers descended somewhere in this area; their Worm looms large in the local mythology.”

“Quote hooey unquote!” Panaflex passes a flat piece of board from a neighboring construction site to Mr. Stimplerum-Clickskin, which the giant deftly lowers over the next stretch of muddy bank. “Just cause a few quote of these so-called First Family patriarchs left unquote diaries, that they later admitted as false once they lived like assholes in our towns . . . well, that’s no quote reason for Quadrilateral residents unquote to put any stock into this quote nonsense. We need our people protected from this unquote poppycock. They don’t want to be unquote harassed where they live, not the quote type of people we want in Consecration unquote anyway. Nothing to those diaries, even Fulcrum Maneuvers’s unquote . . . nothing but a quote bunch of cunt-sick unquote hooey!”

Bush-Bush approaches the wooden board, her shoes sloshing in the mud. “Quadrilateral couldn’t agree more. Only a few malcontents, isolated from the mass of Cultist sentiment. Of course they folded those paper boats. Foreign agitators, remnants of disillusioned imports into Quadrilateral communities, or late-term Cultists emptying from the remaining shantytowns.” She lays on the official line. “Since we don’t negotiate with terrorists, we won’t have to deploy a papyrus galleon to answer.”

“This, right here,” Panaflex stops, banging the ground with a tiny foot, “this is the quote spot then where their Benjamin Benjamin supposedly killed himself by hanging, a cucumber up his anus, his head painted with a red shellac. We’re halfway unquote between the Consecration Community Center and the tail end of the Little Tiber. And here’s where things quote don’t make no sense. The unquote schematics of Consecration show quote the Little Tiber starting in the man-made reservoir of phase I, which it does, and then draining out past phase IV, into an empty desert.”

Panaflex passes Qui his binoculars; they are heavier than the pair from Bush-Bush, and Qui wants desperately to look through the wrong end, to shrink Panaflex to nothing. The small man sniffs the air, wrinkling his tiny nose like a pug dog approaching its brother’s ass, while Mr. Stimplerum-Clickskin raises his boss on enormous shoulders. “Think, you Quadrilateral morons, those paper boats sure as shit aren’t coming from a desert; this thing opens up into a lake somewhere!” Kicking the larger man in the upper torso with legs flailing, Panaflex raises his right arm out flat with great solemnity. Flat at the elbow, it throbs through peaplant ages, radiating a majestic energy, summoning, with a hazel switch, river nymphs bent in unspeakable acts. Stimplerum-Clickskin raises his left leg in time to the right arm of his boss, creating an uneven zigzag, balanced precariously on a wooden board. The balled fist of Woodrow Panaflex cracks. Panaflex switches arms; Stimplerum-Clickskin switches legs. Finally, the small man lifts both arms up to the clouds: “Oh Umma-Segnus, quote thou who art noble born from the egg-water unquote of the Land Spirit . . .” The clouds begin to shift and boil under the strange spectacle of a boy and his man.

“Oh, Umma quote Segnus unquote, who partitioned the ice flows in the salt of the quote womb, who delivers the sacred thump unquote thump to the armies of the Sea Spirit. We evoke your quote hideous slime to rain down upon this land and reclaim it once again unquote for the disenfranchised who await your salty grunge.” Tiny droplets of muddy silt splatter the back of Qui’s neck. Panaflex begins to burp, vibrations amplified through Stimplerum-Clickskin’s lungs.

“Observe the hideousness that man had rendered on your resting place. Quote! Rise once again . . . Unquote! . . . and smash it all into the brittle bones of rebirth . . . ouch . . .” Bush-Bush laughs a mellow tone. Panaflex coughs in teacup fits. Unnoticed, Qui raises the binoculars backward, shrinking the world and its infinitesimal
sky. Muddy rain is rare but not impossible in this part of the Interface, one of the many unexplained weather phenomena that paradoxically encourages the roaring fires to expand their scope. Stimplerum-Clickskin kneels and Panaflex hangs over the water at a forty-five-degree angle from the surface. They form a spiderweb visible in the blight of morning dew, drying out as the day advances.

Bush-Bush stops laughing; Qui remains quiet, intent on the two bodies as one. “Panaflex, enough,” says Bush-Bush. “Think of Dr. Dooger, for wormsakes.”

Panaflex sprinkles a fine dust onto the surface of the water and then hops quickly to the ground with a thud on the wooden board. He pushes forward, aside his giant, slowly, hiccupping and burping, dipping his own toe in the water. “That’s the beauty of it, doll, quote no one knows I’m here unquote. I’ve got cover story that stretches for weeks.”

Lincoln Qui processes through a microscope: Woodrow Panaflex’s enormous toe shivers in the viscous puddle while tiny mud drops splatter his trousers. “Mr. Stimplerum-Clickskin is quote cold, I unquote think.”

“Enough! I’m calling Dooger.” Bush-Bush raises her cuff link.

Mr. Stimplerum-Clickskin walks deeper into the water.

Splashing wildly in an invisible cocoon that gradually constricts his movement. As if paralyzed by a blow dart, he sinks under a clump of lilies. Through the wrong end of the binoculars, Qui can all but discern a tiny sunspot melting into the face of the hot planet. Silence as he disappears below the waterline.

“You can lower that cuff, my dear. He won’t be coming,” says Panaflex.

Qui looks to the horizon. No fire here. In front of his gaze, a paper boat, swollen like a refracted toe, swims lazily through the channel.

Drain is scheduled to be released from Northwestern University Press in June 2010.