Gwydion M. Hastur	

Footprints on the Minge
(excerpt)

They were now entering the freeway, merging onto Interstate Highway 10 heading south; and soon enough they would be at the Mexican threshold. In fact you could drive that same road all the way to Panama if you really wanted to, not that anyone would. 
	"Is there a bridge across the Panama Canal? Or a ferry, or what?"
	"I doubt it's a ferry, or that shit would be shot up by pirates like, daily."
	"Well if there isn't a bridge I think there should be, so that you can drive from Alaska to Argentina if it pleased you. And then the next thing that we should do" ~this was a very coked-up Fair Harrington speaking, by the way~"is build a bridge spanning from Alaska across the Bering Strait and into Russia. It's only like 70 miles, or 90 miles or something. With today's technology that could easily be done."
	"Wait, isn't the Panama Canal only like a hundred feet wide? Ffff, I'm sure they've got a bridge. They have to. I mean, the canal was man-made in the first place, that's why it's called a 'canal', for fuck sake." 
	"So if there was a bridge across the Bering Strait, just think~you could basically drive to Asia. That's brilliant."
	"You wouldn't have to stop there, either. You could drive all the way to Europe."
	Based upon this simple premise, Fair's mind was overtaken by a swarm of wild deductions and fascinating possibilities, so many that he could not keep up even blurting out every fifth or fifteenth or fiftieth one before it was gone. Finally after a particularly violent barrage of ideas (which to him was interminable but during which only three seconds of real time had elapsed) he affirmed, "You could drive all the way to Europe."
	"And it would take you about two weeks of hard driving, too. Hell, you could even drive to Africa if you were really fucking crazy, because you'd have to drive through the Middle East to get there."
	"Not necessarily," Fair shot back, "because there would be a bridge built from Spain to Morocco."
	"Yeah," agreed T.S., glancing at the road for the first time in several minutes. 
"The bridge would be split in two, connected in the middle by Gibraltar~though I'm not sure that Gibraltar's position in the strait is in line with the closest ports of Spain and Morocco . . ." Fair thought about it for a nanosecond, then continued:
	"It wouldn't matter in the slightest, because a bridge can be built between any two points of land, even if they're not the two closest ones. Often times they are not. Take for instance one particular bridge in Ireland which spans the River Shannon. Say you're heading south to Kerry, this bridge departs from Kilrush, Co. Clare and ends in Tarbert, Co. Kerry. Now I'll have you know that neither of these two charming riverside villas are situated at the nearest points on the north and south shores respectively. Instead they are situated at the two furthest points along the length of the Shannon, and by way of the transitive property of algebra they therefore comprise the endpoints of the longest line that could be drawn across the girth of the River Shannon, if ever such a line was called for."
	"Yeah," said Thurgood Schlitz, "Once you could get to Asia and Africa by car, you could pretty much drive to anywhere on the planet."
	"Except Greenland. And Antarctica, which would be impossible to build a bridge to anyway, and not like it would get much use if there was one."
	"I would drive to Antarctica."
	"Yeah, right."
	"I sure the hell would. Just to check it out. Check out some penguins and polar bears and shit like that. Of course I wouldn't stay long, but I'd definitely check it out once." 
"A polar bear of average size could maul you to death in under a minute's time," said Harrington, "and actually I believe that the bridge across the Shannon I was talking about earlier is not a bridge at all but a ferry."
	"I've heard about Irish ferries," said T.S. dis-tractedly. "Do you suppose they could build a bridge to Japan? And if so, where would it depart from?"
	"As a matter of fact there already is such a bridge under construction, and as for where the bridge begins, here we have a perfect example of the point I took pains to illustrate earlier. That being that bridges are not always built between the two closest points of land on either shore of a body of water. Let's have a guess as to where the bridge to Japan starts from. Any idea?"
	"Let's see," said Schlitz, "does it begin in India?"
	Fair snorted in derision, "A bridge from India to Japan, he says. That would be not only impossible but also a horrible idea politically, as the two nations have been mortal enemies for all of recorded history, not to mention it would be a bad idea in terms of cultural identity, as the two cultures are so similar that they seem almost identical; there may be some unwanted crossover and possibly class warfare as a result."
	"It's true, you can hardly tell Indian from Japanese, unless you're an expert at stuff like that. Does the bridge take off from Korea?"
	"North or South?" asked Harrington suspi-ciously.
	"Um," T.S. considered the trick question again then guessed, "North?"
	"It's not North or South Korea. Where do you think the bridge originates from?"
	"Hong Kong?"
	"That's ridiculous," said Harrington, "Hong Kong indeed. A bridge from Hong Kong to Japan. Indeed!"
	"So where does the bridge begin?"
	"Taiwan," Fair announced with finality. "It begins in Taiwan and it runs all the way up to Tokyo. It ends at the Narita airport."
	Thurgood took his words as truth. But then he realized something odd about it.
	"Hey, Japan is an island, and Taiwan is an island."
	"That is true. However, Australia is not an island but rather a continent."
	"Why would someone build a bridge that long between two islands? Why wouldn't they just make the bridge connect to mainland China, so more people could use it?"
	"The answers to your questions are elementary. First and foremost, as I just mentioned, Australia is in fact a continent. And furthermore, not even those at the vanguard of structural engineering could conceive of a bridge long enough to connect Australia and mainland China."
	They were both silent for 2.8 seconds before Fair spoke again. "Hey, I've never driven to Nogales. How close are we? Are we pretty much almost there?"
	As he said this, the car passed a green state highway sign that said Now leaving Phoenix. 
	Schlitz said, "Nah, we have a little ways to go yet. About 185 miles."
	Fair was chewing hard with his numb lower jaw. "Man, this shit wakes you right the fuck up, doesn't it. What did he call it again?"
	"He called it a 'blend,' but The Doctor calls everything a 'blend.' My guess is that the blend we partook of and will be skipping along on for many hours to come is a cocktail comprised of primarily amphetamines and narcotics, including of course the white bitch and possibly also the trashy ho bitch. Beyond that, the only other ingredient I'm sure of is talcum."
	"The white bitch being cocaine?"
	"That's right. Fuckin' blowski."
	"And the trashy ho bitch being – what, crystal meth?"
	"Yeah, uh-huh," nodding his head for emphasis.
	"So two powerful stimulants compounding each other. Interesting. I think I can hear my own heart beating. It feels like it's trying to break out of my ribcage. Fuck."
"Any time you do methamphetamines or stimulants you're causing some amount of trauma to your heart, and sure as shit yours is getting a hard workout right now."
	"Wow. That's fucked up." Quoth Fair Harrington. 
	They passed a road sign that said Nogales 178 miles. 
	Already tired of the confinement of the car and the duration of the trip (they'd gone 14 miles) Fair began to brood a bit inside of himself, then blurted, "So what are we going to do until we get to Nogales? One hundred seventy-eight miles is a long ways away man, and I'm feeling antsy. Like, really fucking antsy."
	"Well, listen to this," said the elder and wiser Schlitz, "I've got just the thing for a fellow like you who is tweaking hard for the first time. It's a game, kind of like something you might have played when you were a kid, only it's that you're playing it now as an adult. On hard narcotics. Just trust me, it'll make the time go by faster, or less slow or something."
	"So what is it, man? I'm about to jump out of my skin here, man."
	"You'll know it right away. It's that game where you look at cars' license plate numbers."
"Oh fuck you, man. Fuck you that sucks."
"Yeah. I'll tell you when I see a state, and you write it down. And also write it down when you've seen a state."
"What the fuck ever."
"But you can't duplicate states. You can only write down each state once. I've already seen —"
Thurgood stopped mid-sentence. A garbage truck had just passed them at top speed. Hanging out of the ass end of it, for Christ's sake – it was a human leg! It appeared to be lifeless and furthermore it looked, though it could not be confirmed, to be still attached to a human body, most likely also lifeless. 
The leg was attired in what appeared to be a denim/jean type fabric, and of the acid-washed variety, which was popular in the late 1980's. 
Also the leg had a foot still attached to the end of it. The foot was attired in what appeared to be a shoe, Converse All-Star variety, which has always been popular for God knows why, they're ugly as sin and just stupid.
"Holy shit man," said Thurgood, "There was a dead body in the back of that garbage truck!"
Harrington had found a pen and was furiously scribbling the word 'Arizona' on a dirty old Burger King take-out bag. "What state was it?" 
"What? DEAD, man!"
"I mean what plate was the state from?"
"Who gives a fuck about the state? Hey," he said, "I'm gonna speed up and get a closer look at this."
Thurgood Motherfucking Schlitz took a sly look into his rearview mirror, pretending he was in Pulp Fiction or something, and then pinned the accelerator flat to the floor. But the crappy little Justy did not respond well to this sudden bold maneuver. It accelerated slightly for a few seconds as the engine sounded a horrible pressurized hum, then slowed back down to about 55 mph as the hum increased in intensity. Schlitz finally relented and withdrew his foot from the pedal.
"Fuck this fucking piece of shit shitbox," he declared.
Fair was intently writing the word "California" on the BK bag. 
"I can never get this shit past 65 without it making like it's going to blow up. And as a consequence, I can never catch runaway garbage trucks with dead bodies in the back. And that, indeed, is a fucking travesty," he concluded with an air of resignation.
Two and a half minutes elapsed and then they passed another green highway sign. It said Nogales 172 miles.
"Jesus God and the heavenly host," exclaimed Schlitz. "We're never going to get there!"
Needless to say, the cocktail that The Doctor had prepared for his newest employees was serving its purpose and then some. 
The remainder of the journey to Nogales lasted about three hours, and no stops were made. Schlitz had turned on the radio and found a station that was playing rock and roll music made in the 1970's, and proceeded to sing along loudly badly with every song regardless of whether he knew the lyrics or not. Fair Harrington continued the crucial task that he'd been assigned, tallying eleven states in three hours, including but not limited to: Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Mexico (not a state, but Schlitz said it counted), Utah, Nevada, Ohio, New York, Florida, and one other. If you can believe it he did not, in three hours time, come across a single plate from Maryland.
	
	Nogales was a lot more decent a town than Fair was expecting. It actually had a Denny's, and a couple of other buildings. Pretty nice. Actually it was a lot shittier than he was expecting.
	It had also started to rain. The drops hitting the top of the car sounded to him like a locomotive engine or the hull of a great ship plowing through ocean waves.
The man who was to meet them was called Juan. No last name was given. The Doctor advised that Juan was the one who was really doing the work, having actually passed the contraband over the international border himself. It was unknown how he did this but The Doc made vague and mysterious remarks alluding to "border politics, over your heads," which was "all they really needed to know."
Having arrived at the designated meeting spot, the parking lot of Wink's Diner, at seven o'clock sharp, they pulled into a parking space and waited for their man to arrive. 
After fifteen minutes the rain stopped, and at the same moment a big car with fat wheels slowly entered the lot. The car was of a nondescript make and model. It had fat bumpers and a fat hood and fat hubcaps. And when Juan got out of his car he was found to be a very fat man of incredible girth. He did not have an ounce of non-fat on him but instead had untold layers of fat. His feet were fat, and he had fat ears, and a pair of fat hands lined with fat fingers. His hair was also fat and one could tell even from a distance that his eyebrows were of an extraordinary fatness. He also appeared in general to be very overweight.
Schlitz watched in amusement this mountain of man laboriously making his way toward the Justy. He said casually to Harrington, "This guy is pathetic." 
Juan had in his left hand a small green duffle bag. In it was presumably whatever product they were going to be running back to The Doctor. 
Thurgood opened his door to get out and noticed that Fair was not moving at all. His eyes were wide open and not blinking, and he appeared to be quite lost in lack of thought. Schlitz left him alone; he didn't want this first-time tweaker to possibly bungle the transaction. So he got out of the car and met the behemoth in front of him.
"You know Doctor?" asked Juan in perfect Mexican English, in a tone that sounded like a girl of age five.  
	"Funny you should ask, because I know quite a few doctors. I'm a long standing member of the Scottsdale TP's, and there on the lush fairways you'll often chance to meet a doctor or two, or even a foursome of them sometimes, just after the crack of dawn."
	This talk was all nonsense and pure bull, and Juan was hardly amused. The earth beneath him continued to endure the awesome force of gravity directly as he did not travel an inch in any direction. And he did not stir otherwise, except that a few seconds after Schlitz had stopped talking, his right eye twitched noticeably.
	Several pregnant moments passed like this before T.S. finally said:
	"So, are you going to give me that bag, or? I mean, I don't know. What do you think. How's about?"
	"Where cash," said Juan. 
	Now this was interesting to Thurgood. Interesting not to mention baffling. What cash? 
	"Cash?" he asked. "What cash?"
	Juan just stared at him even more intensely.
	Schlitz was struggling hard to deny the reality of the situation, trying to come up with some 'rational explanation'. "Oh – are you talking about gas money?" That must have been it. "Sure, Juan, I can chip in for gas. It's not getting any cheaper these days, believe me I know, we just drove down here from Phoenix, and – well it almost seems like you should be chipping in for my expenses," he laughed nervously, "but no, it's alright. How much? Is $5 cool?"
	Again Juan twitched his eye; then he broke the spell. "Twelve thousand." 
	Light traffic passed by on the sleepy street in front of Wink's. Overhead a condor could be heard screaming his hunting song. Fifty feet away a herd of grandmas were making their way from the restaurant to their Buicks. They were all watching him and Juan. Suspended animation.
	"I wasn't –" began Schlitz, "I mean, The Doctor, he didn't say anything about –"
	Juan impersonated a monolith.
	Inside the Justy, Fair Harrington had a sudden inspiration: soon, very soon, he was going to move. But not just yet. He also wondered what was going on outside, who those people were and why it was morning yet he was not at his job. 
	Outside the Justy, Thurgood Schlitz was flailing and blathering along the lines of, "I'm not sure why he didn't tell us that payment would be due, not sure why he did not endow me with these funds, but I am sure that The Doctor will pay you in full, and very quickly; he is a man of status, a man of means. And a man of honor. And a man of his word. He wouldn't –"
	"Shut up!" barked the fattest man in Nogales.
	Schlitz was a man who was known to never lose his cool. He was Mr. Fucking Cool as a Cucumber, all the time. Come hell or high water, this guy was Sade's original "smooth operator." But at the present moment, if truth be told, he was about a hairsbreadth away from getting down on his knees and weeping and begging that Juan wouldn't brutally murder him and then eat his entire corpse as an appetizer for lunch. 
	Juan's lips broke into a slight smile. "Amigo," he said, "you look like you're about to cry or something." 
	"Yeah well," said Thurgood, about to cry.
	"Take it easy, man," said Juan, "this shit is paid for." He laughed briefly and was obviously very amused.
	"Yeah well," said Thurgood, about to fucking die. 
	"You be careful with this shit," said Juan, dropping the green bag lightly in front of Schlitz. "This ain't no tweaker bullshit."
	Thurgood, his composure reassembled, asked, "What in fact is it?"
	Juan looked at him seriously and answered: "Mary Magdalene."
	"That bitch that Jesus fucked in The Last Temptation of Christ?"
	Juan's laugh was shrill and sharp. "Yeah, man. That's the one." He then turned the boat of himself around and began the arduous journey back to his car twenty feet away.
	Back in the Justy, Harrington's ice age was finally thawing. "What was that all about?" he managed to ask when Schlitz got back in.
	"Just doing a little business with my friend Juan, man. And what were you doing? Other than sweepy tweapin' it down home, you lump of shit."
	"Huh?" said Fair. He paused. Then continued. "Wait. What?"
	"What what? 'You lump of shit,' 'sweepy tweapin'?"
	"Yes, what is sweepy tweapin?"
	"Tweaping occurs when one is so spun he cannot even move," counseled Thurgood, "and thus it is like he is sleeping, only quite fucking different. Sort of like a catatonic, only it's not permanent." Then added, "You hope." He started the car and backed out, then entered traffic. 
	"I see. So what's in the bag? Let me guess – Mary Juana?"
	"Actually, you're not too far off," said Schlitz. "It's Mary Magdalene." 
	"What's that?"
	"The Doctor has all kinds of code words for this or that pharmaceutical," he explained. "For all I know it's some shitty jimson weed or something." 
They were cool now. The time on the Justy digital clock read 02:56, but that's because it was fucked up. The time was really about half past seven.
"Well, let's try some," suggested Fair. 
	Schlitz made a shitty grin and said, "Try some, eh? I like your thinking." He looked away and continued, "No, we can't touch this stuff, because The Doctor knows exactly how much he should be getting and he will notice if any of it is gone. Believe me, he knows exactly how much."
	Fair, showing off his worldly experience with illegal drugs, said, "Well, wouldn't he let us have some anyway, since we're the ones picking it up?" 
	Schlitz was merging onto the interstate. "No, no, no. No. He's not compensating us for our services with drugs, he's paying us with cash. And beyond that, this is his fucking property. He's the one that forked out twelve thousand or however the fuck much for it." T.S. continued, "If he wants to share some with us when we get back, then sure, by all means, I'll give it a go. But until then, it's – it's just not ethical."
	"Some people think drugs are unethical," said Fair sarcastically.
	"Yeah, and some people think of God as a sadistic genius who loves to fuck with people just for his own sick amusement. Like a bratty kid pulling the legs off frogs or something, just because he can."
	Thurgood had been looking out the window and now turned to find Harrington with the duffle bag in his lap, the top open, and his hands inside it.
	"Hey, man," said Schlitz imploringly. "Hey! Keep your grubby dickskinners out of there. That shit is property of The Doctor and no one else."
	Fair was looking in the bag. Then he asked coyly, "Aren't you curious what Mary Magdalene is?"
	"Dude," said Schlitz, more stern than ever, "I'm sure it's just some fucking grade-D dirty schwag that you can only sell to a 12-year old." 
	Silence.
	"Isn't it?"
	Silence.
	"Isn't it?"
	Schlitz glanced at Harrington and found him smiling yet strangely fearful. Like he had just swallowed a goldfish.
	"I need a fucking drink, and fast," declared Thurgood Schlitz. Simultaneously he noticed a skyscraping Starlight Super Stop sign about a mile up the road and proceeded to blindly merge into the right lane. Only by luck did he not merge into another vehicle.
	"Christ on the cross, bleeding all over." 
It was Fairchild Harrington. He added thoughtfully, "This is my life."
	"Chill out man, you're making me seasick," said Schlitz, and he wasn't lying. He pulled in at the Starlight and parked. "You're coming with me, and you're not going to leave my sight. And neither is that bag. Got it?"
	But Harrington was far, far down the path by that point, and he could not possibly have heard his guardian angel's voice, let alone his own or Thurgood's. 

	T.S. went inside alone after all, and drank a couple of double whiskies. He didn't want to bring Fair inside because he figured that he was now under the power of some cursed hallucinogen.
	The bartender Sal asked him how his day was going. "Let me tell you," Schlitz confided, "there are some mornings when things just seem to all go right for once. Do you know what I mean?"
	Sal said, "Oh, sure."
	Thurgood replied, "Well, this morning wasn't one of those mornings. This morning sucked. This morning was a joke." He continued, "If some pathetic loser ever wrote my biography, I would hope to God he didn't include this morning in the story." 
	During the time that Schlitz was in the bar, which was less than half an hour, Harrington visited the following alternate dimensions:

1.	Candyland, which looks and feels exactly like the board game, which was secretly his favorite as a child. He enjoyed this visit thoroughly, but was forced against his will to visit
2.	Blandyland, which was a hellish office setting very similar to his former place of employment. He wanted to leave it as quickly as possible to get to the next one,
3.	Andyland. Here everyone looked and talked like Andie McDowell. He loved this place so much he never wanted to leave, but he was forced to. And the next place he found himself in was
4.	Randyland, which was even better…

Meanwhile, Schlitz was back out and behind the wheel, tanked and ready to face the morning. 
"Son," he said to Harrington, "I don't know what you're experiencing right now, but I respect it. Now we've got to hightail it to The Doctor's to drop this shit off and get paid for services rendered."
A ways down the road Schlitz continued. "Oh yeah, about our payment. I haven't really talked to the M.D. about your pay, so I don't know. He might give you a little something, you know, for the effort. Or you might just be my unpaid lackey. Who knows?"
Normally this commentary would have stoked the raging anger inside Harrington, but not today. Not at this moment. Because right there in the passenger seat of Thurgood Schlitz's piece of shit Justy, Fair Harrington was getting fucked by the most famous whore of modern times.

____

Gwydion M. Hastur lives in Minneapolis. He wrote Footprints on the Minge during a November Novel Writing Month.