Escape from Rodeo Burger—Chapter 3

I heard violin music in the dark. Sweet and melodic. Soft and slow. Maybe I was in Heaven. But they play harps in Heaven—everyone knows that. It was cold and I was naked. I presumed I was dead, but then I wondered why would I be lying there, naked on my backside on a metal table if I were in Heaven. They must not have slaughtered me yet. But for some reason, I could not move anything other than my eyelids and eyeballs. 

I scanned the room. It was cold, sterile, and cylindrical. I was alone. The walls were metal and it looked as though I was inside of an empty can of soup. There was a sole light overhead that seemed to float and to watch me. It was shaped like a human eye and it blinked now and then and when it blinked, in that split-second, it was completely dark.  

I wondered where she was but I couldn't remember her name. Was it Patsy? Patsy? Then suddenly above me, old video footage appeared on the ceiling of Lee Oswald being asked questions by reporters. The sounds of flashing camera bulbs popped and frantic chatter filled the room. JFK rolled along and was shot in the head as he had been just a year earlier in 1963. Then there was Jack Ruby to tidy things up and take care of Oswald. It was 1964 on Pseudo, but my father told me it was 2025 on Earth. 

"I am a patsy!" Oswald insisted. He repeated himself over and over and his face got larger and larger until I was lost in the pupil of his eye which became the black of Patsy Cline's hair who was singing "Crazy" at the Grand Ole Opry. 

"Crazy—

For thinking that my love could hold you.

I'm crazy for trying,

And crazy for crying.

And I'm crazy for loving you."

And then she was gone as soon as I realized her name wasn't Patsy—it was Esther. How ashamed I was that I forgot, but I realized my cinfusion was caused by the gas, the cold, the sudden change of atmospheric pressure—and no fault of my own. And then everything I thought of Esther appeared on the ceiling where Oswald and Patsy Cline had just been. I realized that somehow they had tapped into my brain and exported my thoughts to the ceiling of the room which floated above me like a giant white ball. 

Shamefully, I imagined us making love in a field of grass, and though I was the only one in the room besides for that eye, I was embarrassed by the display and squirmed on the table the way a man in moral crisis squirms in one of those jerk-off porno theaters to an orgy of twenty-foot naked women being bent, twisted, and sodomized by giant penises. Or so I presume. 

I tried to think of nothing, but that was impossible. I tried not to look at what was being projected onto the ceiling, but I couldn't help but to look, curious as I was. I didn't realize how often I thought of sex. Or of donuts and work. Or of Esther, suddenly. I suppose I was trying to burn her image into my mind so I wouldn't forget her in the short time I had left. But I feasted upon various scenarios of us escaping and was betrayed by my thoughts that played above like a double-feature. Then a door that wasn't before apparent opened, and in walked someone who wasn't an alien at all, at least, not in appearances.  

She looked a little like a soap opera actress my mother favored who had starred in Affairs of the Heart—the most popular soap opera on Pseudo. Bizarrely, she wore a uniform that resembeled an German SS uniform—all black—jackboots, the hat she held in her black-leather-gloved hands. And draped over her shoulders was the black-leather trench coat. The skull and crossbones prominently pinned to her lapel. Her eyes were the color of that Texas sky, her hair was a dark fire-red, and her skin was pale as milk. 

Maybe she was her—that sultry TV vixen who torpedoed her career doing pornography. But she smiled at me and I imagined myself beating her senseless, or so my thoughts on the ceiling told me. She looked up, unbothered by the violence against her that my mind impulsively hemorrhaged. 

"Comfortable?"

I didn't answer, even though I realized my mouth worked just fine. I seemed to be okay from the neck up. I gave her the silent treatment and refused her the dignity of words. She was one of them, after all. She noticed me uncomfortably looking at the ceiling. 

"Oh, you needn't worry about that. You'd be quite surprised how many people's first inclination is to kill whoever they meet, especially, someone in your predicament. Maybe it's a thought they don't even realize, but it is, no less. Human nature, as they say. Human nature," she repeated in a contemplative way before offering nothing else.

She grinned at me in that condescending sort of way people in a position of superiority grin. She was an asshole, I concluded. Worse, she was the kind of person who prided herself in being an asshole, and I hated her before she said another word. Then I felt bad for hating her, or hating anyone at all, because hatred is evil and evil is Satan. I knew that. Hatred feeds the devil. And so all my mind's incarnations of Satan projected onto the ceiling. 

"Oh, you shouldn't hate me, Victor. I am your savior."

Then Jesus Christ projected onto the ceiling in all His glory. His crucifixion, or as it was envisioned in my head as it had been popularized in paintings of lore I had seen in my studies of Earth history—that which was given to Pseudo on loan. It seemed to give my visitor some pleasure. She chuckled like I was a silly child—like I still believed in the Easter Bunny. Her leather gloves mewled as she clinched her fists as though clutching some invisible thing. 

"My name is Der Retter. But you can call me, Savior, if you wish. You see, I'm here to save your life, Victor. So these unfortunate images your mind has displayed above us of you murdering me in various agonizing yet, playful sorts of ways, or harming me otherwise, are unprovoked by the nature of of my intentions. This is the greatest thing you've ever won in your life. Congratulations, Victor, we want to employ you!"

"Who is we?"

"We will get to that, in due time."

She extended her black leather hand to shake. Her eyes were pale and hollow, I realized. Though they were a beautiful shade of soft blue, there was an emptiness about them. It was as though nothing was behind them at all. No soul.

So I shook her small gloved hand because my mother taught me to have manners, and so mannerly it was to shake when a hand was offered. She carefully put the black leather coat and hat at the foot of my bed then climbed on top of me and straddled me, her knees alongside my hips as though she were a jockey settling into a saddle. 

She told me very loudly that I was selected to be the breeder, so it was her duty to determine if I could fulfill my obligations adequately or if they would have to try someone else out. If not, for me it would be the obvious outcome. Slaughter—grinder—rodeo burgers. 

She undressed in the sort of way I had seen women undress on TV shows I shouldn't have watched. I'd watch between the crack of an open door as my parents watched on the living room couch. Between the backs of their heads I learned a lot about seduction and depravity. About lovemaking and breeding and the distinction therein. To a child of six or seven, it was a lesson to be learned and I did so not in some licentious sort of way, but because I was a curious boy. 

Her name was Barbie Swoon and she was the actress I remember. She was also Ms. November 1957 in Playboy Magazine—that was the pornography she did. She allowed herself to be photographed naked and so the network issued a death sentence to the writers and the director and they carried it out by killing her off of Affairs of the Heart. She died in a car accident on the 1958 season finale six years ago. I was 13 years-old. 

Had she not been looking at me she would see that on the ceiling my mind recalled her, shamefully, and projected her Playboy photoshoot down to the freckle on her left kneecap onto the ceiling which stirred in me so that my most prodigious digit pointed northward. It was a glorious erection—a revival—a doozy—and it made itself known in the crotch of her black Nazi pants. I knew then that I wasn't paralyzed at all, and that they had simply disconnected something in my mind that controlled my body and then reconnected it.

"Well, well," she said, smiling at me. "That is certainly a good start."

She leaned in to kiss me but whispered in my ear that she was a part of "the resistance," and that I had to go along or we both would die. They were watching. They were always watching. Everyone would die, she went on. Then she playfully nibbled my ear and giggled as fornicators do while fornicating. Boy, she had incredible tits. 

She got undressed and it was then that I realized that I was undressed. She grabbed my cock like it was a throttle to some machine and it stiffened in ger grip. She smiled a sympathetic sort of smile and on the ceiling above flashed a million different sporadic things. Her in the soap opera. Her in Playboy. For some reason Mickey Mantle hitting a home run. The love-making I'd seen on TV through the gap of my parents' heads. Then Esther—as I had dreamed of Esther. Her and I making love in the grass of a field I've never been. Would I even see her again?

My father watched lovemaking the way he watched sports—like a sociopath with no emotion whatsoever. Like he was watching someone churn butter or repair a leaking pipe. My mother, on the other hand, got all flustered. She would squirm in her seat, and bite her lip, and clear her throat, or she would go on about indecency and it being unholy what they put on TV these days. Yet, still, despite her protest, she would watch with a keen eye. 

I've never made love before—I was only 19, after all, and the opportunity hadn't presented itself in such a way that I felt compelled to accept it. I could have made love to the girl I worked with at Donut World—the one who called Bob a slob. She was a loose goose, as they say. But I didn't see a point in it. It would have been meaningless—an empty gesture. And my maiden voyage down the love canal would have been wasted. So when she flirted with me, I told her I had a girlfriend. I suppose, even though I didn't know Esther at the time, I knew that she existed—somewhere. I had faith. And that was enough for me. 

But there I was in a tin can on some sort of examination table making love to the infamous Barbie Swoon, ruining a perfectly good romance that had just budded. I didn't have a choice. I could have already been slaughtered, but I wasn't. I was a slab of meat, one way or the other, but one way I would be grilled and the other I would be rode. The only way was for me to be their breeder. Animals having sex in their natural habitats flooded my mind and the ceiling. Dogs. Tigers. Deer. Giraffes, even. You name it. At some point in life, I had seen it all. And it came to mind and was projected overhead like an X-rated episode of National Geographic. 

Barbie knew what she was doing. Boy, did she ever know what she was doing. She moaned in delight and exclaimed things I've never heard uttered from human lips—wild and erotic sorts of things that they might say in pornographic films. And though I've never seen pornographic films, I could imagine. My parents never had sex as far as I knew. I think my father was all washed up from the war or something.

Barbie gyrated and rode me like I was a hobby horse—like the penny pony at Richwood's, the only grocery store in Kilgore where my mother used to take me and leave me a time or two. The first time, I was only six or seven, and it was frightening. The penny pony's name was Sandy. I rode Sandy while my mother checked out. When I looked up, my mother was gone. 

Under any other circumstance, I would have been thrilled. To have sex with a beautiful actress and Playboy model was a dream come true. The pleasure of it was without compare. She soaked my lap with periodic love squirts and I orgasmed as I had never done by myself before, like a geyser. Afterwards, she feigned exhaustion and collapsed on top of me, her face to my ear, and she told me more of the plot against our captors.

"We got to get out of this place. There's a group of dissidents that are leading a rebellion against Rodeo Burger and the amoral consumption of meat. They are supposed to be here soon to break in and round you and the females up and send you back to Pseudo Earth, so be ready and be patient. But don't think about it right now. Please don't think! They are watching what you think!"

"What about you?"

"I'll be okay, stud. I'll find my way. Thanks for the good sex, kid."

She got up and got dressed. Then she spoke loudly to the eyeball on the ceiling that I was good and would do just fine.

"We found our breeder, boys!" she called as she staggered away. Then that floating eye blinked, seemingly in satisfaction, and my thoughts no longer played upon the ceiling, and all went dark.