TSJ15

I'd moved on in life when I wrote this, but was completely lost. Late 20s, nothing to show for it except a dodgy car and a dodgier cat. It would be another few years before I made the choice to get into journalism, and everything that is worthwhile in my life came from that decision, but  there is a peculiar kind of 'it's all over' ennui when you're a 26-year-old loser.

I thought this would be the last one, but I was wrong, professor! Dead wrong! 

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    The plot is lost before it even gets up off the ground, shot down like a mad dog and left to rot in the bushes. Fears of a complete loss of coherence are at the forefront, but it's far too late to turn back now. The thing has begun, and nothing started ever finishes, even if it does have a big, fat 'THE END' at the bottom of the page.

     "For fuck's sake!" swears Dr. Jacob Skin loudly as he pisses on the fourth wall again and reads the above drivel. "I thought he'd given up all that pretentious bullshi000.t." 

     "Apparently it's easier to write than normal stuff," offers Kristine, leaning over his shoulder to se the current debacle.

     "Just once, I'd like something nice and simple."

     "Who wouldn't?" says Kristine, losing all interest and moving onto more important things. "So what are we going to do tonight, dear?"

     "What we do every night, love! Make it up as we go along!"

    Fuck it! Roll credits!

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ThEraPeutIc SKIn JobS #15
 
Be Seeing You

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    "Can you hear me?" screams Dr. Skin at the top of his lungs, desperate to be heard over the roar of the engine, his foot still pressing down on the endless accelerator, the speed on his exceedingly useful vehicle increasing at an exponential rate. Fortunately, the desert highway is aptly deserted, nobody to impede their progress towards a destination of ill repute. "Am I getting through to you?"

     The voice, low and hollow, crackles through the earpiece of the mobile phone he is holding to his ear. "Living in skin is living is sin is laughing is shin. We are the bastard children of HAL9000 and Johnny Rotten! What have you got to lose?"

     "What complete rot," sneers the good Doctor, tossing the phone out the window of the Car with no Name and turning to Kristine, seated beside him. "That didn't make any sense."

     "What does anymore?" answers Kristine, opening the latest issue of the Weekly World News to page A12 and reading of the latest apocalyptic sign. "The whole human race is running around like a chicken that's just had its head chopped off. We've had our collective heads in the sand like bloody ostriches for too long, and now it's suddenly the 21st century and nobody has a clue what to do about it."

     She pauses for breath, only to mutter quietly to herself. "Damn. I'm sure I could've got another avian simile in there if I tried."

     "You did your best," says Skin encouragingly, before tapping the front page of the paper. "Any news?"

     Kristine glances at the article that had recently caught her attention. "Apparently some woman in New Mexico ran over the Devil."

    "Really? Was he injured?"

     "Doesn't say. It does say his real name is Earl."

     "Don't believe everything you read in the newspaper, baby," says Dr. Skin, gritting his teeth and gripping onto the steering wheel with ferocious intent. "Hey, you know what we need?"

     "Popcorn?"

     "No, not us. I mean the world. You know what humanity really needs?"

     "More popcorn?"

     "Another Ghandi!"

     "Makes sense to me," replies Kristine, tossing the newspaper aside and downloading some music from the Car's Shard-Drive. Random selection and she's hoping for Rock Gods, Guitar Heroes in Hyper-reality, taking that last chord on a day trip around the universe. But all she gets is Wings: 'Live And Let Die!'

     What does it matter to you?

     "What a Bonderful world," sighs Skin, leaning back in his seat. His good mood rapidly evaporates when he sees a car on the horizon behind them, gaining fast. His eyes narrow as he recognizes one of the greats: The last of the V-8 Interceptors.

     "We're not getting anywhere," says Skin with a groan, yanking the wheel to the right. "Time for a new direction."

     The Car swerves off the desert highway, slips into one of the spaces between nothing, roars down a tunnel deep in thought space and emerges, kicking and screaming, into J Street.

     No sooner have they arrived back, than a figure in a trendy shade of red leaps onto the bonnet of Skin's vehicle, holding on as it speeds down the road, screaming in some mad foreign tongue.

     "Oh shit," murmurs Kristine. "It's Shin-Tzu Sing: Kung-Fu King!"

     "It is time to settle our blood feud, Skin!" he roars over the sound of the engine and the air whistling past. "Once and for all!"

     "Oh, piss off," snarls Skin, slamming on the brakes with maximum force. There's no fucking way Sing can hold on, and he flies off, his face slamming into hot, hard pavement, resulting in exactly the kind of gore you'd expect to see when a man's head hits the road at 120kph.

     Improbably, he still lives, but the situation is soon corrected as Skin follows through, driving forward and crushing Sing's spine under his wheels. Skin doesn't bother looking back as he thunders away down the street. "That was a bit harsh," moans Kristine, her attention span somewhere around three nanoseconds as she plugs back into the car's computer, selecting a favourite game, playing God with digital fictions. "He was just doing his job. Genre fiction requires certain concessions, y'know."

     Skin doesn't reply, his attention on the road.

     Kristine continues regardless. "Besides, you usually like fighting. It's so damn entertaining."

     "Not this time, baby. I've getting sick of all that crap." He glances over at the screen set into the dashboard in front of her. "What are you playing?"

     "'The Sims'", she replies, not looking up from her game. "Version 23. Ultimate Big Brother/God deal. You create people and make them do whatever you want. You name them and decide their actions for them."

     Skin's vision begins to go crazy, but he blinks it away. "That sounds to me like any other video game. They all allow you to play God."

     "Yes, but in this one you create real people with motivations and histories. All they lack is a corporeal being, but in every other respect, they're real people. Look!" She pointed at a lone figure standing in the middle of the screen. "There's one of them now. I call 'im Max Zee. He's a J Street character I've been building him up for a while, but I'm just about done with him now. I've just about finished his story."

     "What are you going to do with him?"

     "I don't know," sighed Kristine. "I was just going to kill him off, but I think I'll just let him live happily ever after. After all, he didn't do anything to me, why should I want him dead?"

     She snaps the screen away and turns to Skin, only now noticing the sweat building on his face. "Jacob? Are you okay?"

     "I'm fine," he grunts, speeding in a number of different ways. "But I think we've run out of time. We thought we had all of eternity to fuck about in, but nothing lasts forever. Some things do have endings."

     "What are you saying?"

     Dr. Skin takes his eyes off the road for the first time, looks deep into Kristine's eyes, smiles and winks. "It time to take it to the limit."

    "It's about time!" hollers Kristine in full support, slumping back in her seat and fastening her seatbelt. "Take me to the zenith, baby!"

     "You got it, darlin'," smirks Skin, speeding up and pushing his way into another reality through a fierce combination of will, wit and a 2000 horsepower engine. Just before existence repairs the hole he's ripped into its hide, Skin waves back, laughing for no obvious reason and screaming incoherent farewells. "Goodbye J Street. Goodbye NEB. Goodbye CBR. It's about time I grew up and got a life."

     And just like that, Dr, Jacob Skin vanishes from the world, confused memories and the temporary stench of ozone in the air the only lingering effects. Life goes on without the good Doctor and his lovely companion. The Universe almost mourns a lost son, but finds plenty of others to take his place.

     Dr Skin and Kristine pass beyond everything in their Car With no Name, annihilating space-time with their velocity and experiencing their whole lives again and again, spiraling through their own experiences for all eternity. White noise on a cosmic level, but it soon clears up, and understanding hits, just like it always does.

     Out there, beyond everything, Skin and Kristine live on, patron saints of the adolescent yearning for insanity. The ultimate escape from responsibility in the form of complete dementia appeals to all at one time or another, and in that moment, they're there, listening for signs of true madness. Living on, driven on by the artistic merits of madness. Held forever by the contemplation of derangement that stretches into eternity.

     They end like they begin, the paranoia revisitations evident in everything they do. Nothing makes sense anymore, but it never did. Everything is getting old, changing too fast, falling apart, evolving into new concepts, forgetting the past. Everything is evolving, everything is going mad.

     Everything is losing the plot. 

THE END