fuck cares!” The following day V learned that the man who had been seated next to her was a Nobel Prize winning nano-scientist working on a government project in Colorado Springs. "So friggin’ what!"V remarked to herself when she learned of her ignorance.
V’s father died from an oversized hybrid Africanized honey bee attack. Strangely odd, since the killer bee is unable to survive as far north as Colorado. Maybe, its faulty navigation had something to do with global warming. In whatever case, V was left to pay the astronomical taxes on the mansion known as Shady Sanctum. Maxfield Talbot, her father’s step brother, helps out with his royalties from several books——An Entomological Study Of Washington DC, How To Think Like An Ant Before The Rapture, Don’t Kill Our Friends The Bedbugs,and For The Love Of Dung Beetles. His foray into the field of etymology produced his first book on that subject, Conversations With Insects, but he soon returned to his entomological roots due to a royalty dispute; one does not pay interviewees! There is also Max’s Social Security which helps to keep Shady Sanctum in the family. There is little left in the Talbot coffers after paying for all those pounds of illicit drugs, his traveling expenses before he learned to fold space, his latest trip to Haiti on bug business, and all those epicurean escapades in Morocco.
Maxfield has made it his life’s work to study arthropods which led to his earning a rather widespread reputation from his knowledge of the practical implementation of gene splicing. His lectures on the ins-and-outs of entomology were a hit on the university circuit. Any knowledge of his surreptitious experiments in insect husbandry——though not quite the Doctor Mengele of the insect world——were nonetheless restricted to a select few peers. One of them was Doctor Fleischmann, an old Queen City University chum who now lived on an obscure island in the Coral Sea.
Doctor Fleischmann was released from prison after five years for not living up to his oath as a doctor of medicine, which caused the death of a wildly popular pop singer which, in turn, made Fleischmann a wildly unpopular pariah. So, he sequestered himself on a small island east of New Caledonia and northeast of Australia known as Sphincter Island. While working for the late pop star Fleischmann bought the island with cold hard cash. That was before he murdered his cash cow; the King of Pop.
The last time Max saw Fleischmann they spent their time together reminiscing about the old days. They entertained themselves having a bit of fun for auld lang syne. Manipulating DNA was always great fun. So, Maxfield and Fleischmann went to work manipulating the DNA of a New Caledonian scorpion with the DNA of an African cockroach. The result was a super-sized cockroach with an unnerving sized scorpion stinger like a rat’s tail. The thrill of creation! The ecstasy and the rapture from ejaculating without touching yourself was overwhelming. Work was good. Then it happened, the Murphy’s Law, the thing they never anticipated; their creation quickly duplicated itself and the duplication began to duplicate and so forth, exponentially. Their little monsters would soon be problematic.
The morning after their venerable accomplishment, Max awoke to observe several cockpions crawling up the windowpane. He imagined they were looking for a chink in the window. In a blink of his eye, the cockpions paired-up and began dancing the tango, the dangerous kind, razor-sharp angles, quick turns around the surface of the glass and all the while their stingers stood ready, but for what, or whom? “It’s time to boogie,” Max said out loud to no one but himself.
The short history of the big building on the island is that it was home to hundreds of terminally ill patients from around the world; a place to rest and wait. When whispers and rumors of Doctor Sphincter’s experimentations with body parts, especially fresh organs removed from his patients, both dead and alive, for his clandestine work to create a super-subspecies of Man, it all came to a complete halt when the authorities discovered his true vocation; he was then murdered on the spot by subhumans with brooms and pitchforks. The sanatorium was closed permanently. The Island of Doctor Sphincter was abandoned sometime in the 1950s and remained so until Doctor Fleischmann took-up residence in the early 2000s. Serving as doctor to the biggest rock star in the world paid unnecessarily well.
“Thank you Maxfield, you’ve been a good friend.”
“You doknow what will happen sooner than later?”
“I do. There is nowhere else for me to go. I am a pariah, you know.”
“I do,” mumbled Max. "Big time."
Doctor Fleischmann and Max walked in silence to the edge of the cliff on the far side of the island. They hugged one last goodbye before Max jumped from the cliff and disappeared into somewhere in the future, leaving only sparks of light that were soon extinguished by the ocean below. Maxfield reappeared under his bed. “Boy-o- boy, I’m getting pretty good at this!” Max, as he occasionally does, gleeked.
Sphincter Island was no longer habitable by humankind, nor mammals of any kind; only the pariah was left behind, tucked away from society. The huge cockpions were discovered to be cannibals that survived solely by eating one another. After every meal, they were always ferociously hungry, the cockpions split like giant amoebas infesting the island. Doctor Fleischmann knew that he could no longer endure his unique predicament. He could not live with himself for the rest of his life——which he knew would be a short one. “For Pete’s sake! I really liked his music, his dancing——”He then chose the largest cockpion from those slowly circling him, he picked it up and held it in the palm of his hand,“This is for you, Mikey.”Fleischmann waited until he felt the devil’s sting. As he lay dying, his last spoken words were, “This is it, isn’t it?” And then he was cockpion food.
Max is rarely invited to speak at universities, nor take all-expense paid trips to study bugs as he once did. When he briefly taught entomology at Queen City University his students referred to him as “A giant in his field,” then they giggled and he would humbly thank them. It took Max two years after his fleeting stint at QCU to become conscious of what they meant.
His short tenure in academia came to an abrupt end in a university men’s room. Max and three of his students were caught smoking marijuana; pre-legalization. He was conducting an experiment into the nature of memory loss. Who the devil knows why academics are so damn incredulous!? Maxfield seemed insane to some, to others he was simply an old hippy drug addict, but to a brave few, Professor Doctor Maxfield Talbot PhD was a master and guide into the creative powers hidden within the vast unending universe of the Self——the magical, mystical place of creation. Some thought Professor Talbot, TheMaster. However, Theor not, Master or not, following him was a trip down a rabbit’s hole––something to ponder before jumping in.
The late Missus Reverend Aires died while giving birth to V, so naturally she had fulfilled any debt to that which posterity could possibly hold claim. V’s mother is remembered by V’s great uncles and aunts as a ferocious force of nature with a fun wit. The late Missus Aires was clearly demented, or possessed. She loved acting in little theatres around Queen City until, while playing Ophelia in Hamlet——the devil knows what got into her——she broke-out into song and danced the cooch across the stage. What a memorable farewell performance! She gave birth to V nine months later and died, but not until every last drop of her spirit found its way into her newborn, Victoria. Whenever conversations turn to family history, especially involving the late Missus Aires, amazingly, no one recalls a thing. When relatives turn their memories to Maxfield, they cannot remember his ever looking younger than he appeared to them now. Fifty year old memories and yet Maxfield has always appeared close to seventy. They chalk it up to the tricks of memory.
Gert Aires-Birdsall, V’s father’s sister, along with her husband Charlie, established a retreat near Lake Titicaca in Peru for clairvoyants, spiritualists, astral projectionists, space and time folders and intergalactic surfers who ride gravitational waves through spacetime just for the hell of it.
Puerto Nostradamus, highly praised in several esoteric journals,
