The trumpet call of Shambhala has drawn my focus elsewhere for the moment; the East is a land of old and unpredictable evils, and the Mysteries of the Sleeper have awakened. I’ll find my way home when I can…
As The Retropolitan and I whirled about through time and space, locked together in a sort-of-hot, sort-of-not embrace, I found myself thinking about all the things that had lead to this very moment. The year was 1931, and a rather unfortunate accident after a longish night involving Howard Hughes, that Ol’ Janx Spirit and a spoon had left me with significantly less of my insides than I was comfortable with. Howard took it upon himself to repair the damage done, and hence; another Chronobot was born. The longish morning following the longish night found me a new woman, complete with temporal integration turbines*, slightly longer legs than before and a peculiar craving for orange soda. I also ended up with one little extra bit inside of me, one that no one knew about. Except Howard and I. One that The Retropolitan couldn’t have foreseen and was about to become all too familiar with.
Howard, fresh off Hell’s Angels and knee-deep into Scarface had been dabbling on the side in technology that could safeguard he and his from air-borne violence. Specifically, time-traveling National Socialist Nosferatus. Knowing that the powers to bend time and space, placed in the wrong hands, could come to no good, a fail-safe was installed in my jugular. If, within moments of activating my temporal integration turbines, my jugular was also punctured, my assailant and I would be thrust into the most improbable place imaginable.
*Bump*. We landed together, still gooey and oozey, on a sofa covered in plastic. I distinctly smelled cookies in the air. The Retropolitan looked over his shoulder, looked back at me, and then fixing his gaze high onto the ceiling.
“Maaaaawm!”, he cried out.
A sweet, grey-haired little old woman came around the corner, looked over the scene that had just landed in the middle of her living room, walked over to us and with all the determination she could muster, whacked him square in the head.
“If I have told you once, son, I have told you a million times, NOT ON MY COUCH! Just look what a mess you have made. And you, you poor dear, what has my son done to you? Ugh. Let’s get you cleaned up. Retro, you get over to that corner RIGHT NOW and stick your nose in it.”
“Mom, seriously, I am two-hundred and seventy eight yea…”
“I don’t care if you are President of the United States. Nose. Corner. NOW.”
The Retropolitan, with shoulders hung low, made his way to the corner. His mother opened a drawer, pulled out her sewing kit, and started putting me back together.
“I swear; that child. It’s always with the gore with him. I taught him better than this, you know. Why can’t he just give a girl a flower once in a while? His father brought me flowers ever week. But noooo, he’s got to go straight for the neck and the guts. I remember, this one time….”
She went on and on, meanwhile stitching my insides back together with a precision that lead me to believe I was not the first Chronobot victim to find her way to this sofa.
After I was mended and the sofa wiped down, she invited us both to sit down for a cupa’ tea and some sandwiches. As she entered the kitchen, The Retropolitan whined, “No, mom, we’re in the middle of something here.”
Mrs. The Retropolitan shouted from the kitchen, “Boy, you are in quite enough trouble as it is. I suggest you sit your butt down and eat something before you loose your allowance.”
The Retropolitan grumbled, and then sat down. His mother turned the corner, carrying a pot of tea and a plate of Reuben sandwiches.
“ANDY! I have to get back!”
I lept from my chair, hastily thanked Mrs. R., and ran outside.
Right smack into the middle of New York City.
*Someone really should come up with a clever acronym for those things; that’s a lot to type each time.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I said to the recovering Retropolitan as I handed him the Reuben on rye. “It didn’t look like there were any Nazis guarding this place, but I know that’s too good to be true.”
“Unless they know you know,” said Mr. Lady’s sibling. “In that case, maybe there really is no one around.” She cocked an eyebrow.
“Good point,” I said, but then quickly countered with the observation that if I knew that they knew that I knew, then chances are they were probably just right outside the only exit from the room.
“Aha, but if they know that you know that they….”
“Enough,” said the Retropolitan, getting to his feet and cracking assorted joints with unsettling pops and snaps.
Mr. Lady’s sister and I both cringed. I thought about interjecting on how I also hate the sound of hands smoothing out bedsheets, but this didn’t seem the place for sharing such intimacies, particularly that because of this I had lived a life of shame regarding my always unmade bed.
The Retropolitan walked over to the door and placed one ear against it, his eyes turned upward as if struggling to hear, or perhaps trying to remember a line from a song. “There are no Nazis outside this door,” he continued, gesturing the two of us toward our escape route.
Right off hand, I couldn’t think of any songs that had “there are no Nazis outside this door” in the lyrics, so we approached, although I must admit I did stay a half-step behind. Better safe than sorry, given that my specialty is not “lyrics to popular music.”*
As Mr. Lady’s sister leaned her ear to the door, everything – as it has a tendency to do – went all kinds of wrong.
One minute I was surreptitiously eyeballing her keister as she pressed herself to the door, and the next my field of vision was obscured by a very fast, and very untouched, Reuben on rye headed directly at me. I’ve never been a big fan of the Reuben, although I have plenty of friends who enjoy one from time to time, some of them may even order more than one in a given week yet I still took this refusal of my offering as an insult to my honor.
“Why, the nerve,” I thought, as the sandwich caught me square in the forehead, sending me to the floor. I like to think it was more the force of the throw than some general inability to resist wheat-borne weapons, but regardless I found myself flat on my back and staring up at the Retropolitan holding Mr. Lady’s sister firmly by the neck.
His eyes darted up again. There was a pause. He began to sing a line from a song…
Well, Green Eyes with their soft lights,
Did Mr. Lady’s sister have green eyes? I had no idea. In the heat of the moment, the thrill of being under fire, such details get overlooked. You have to focus on the important things: gams, yabos, keisters, and such.
What I did know is that she had two eyes, I had counted them, and they were both turned toward the Retropolitan, an expression caught somewhere between terror and weakening will.
Your eyes that promise sweet nights,
Really now, after the Reuben attack, this was just piling it on. I liked her first. Well, her sister anyway. But still, I’m a sensitive chap, you know.
Bring to my soul a longing, a thirst for love divine.
And with that he smiled, his mouth full of brilliant, pearly teeth, two of which happened to be rather long and pointy. “Long and pointy,” to hear the womenfolk tell it, isn’t always a bad thing, but I think in the case of teeth near one’s neck, it generally is.
As I lay there trying to remember who sang that song – I just knew it would bother me all day if I didn’t – he latched onto Mr. Lady’s sister’s neck with his fangs, and simultaneously plunged his hand, armed with wicked sharp fingernails I forgot to describe earlier, into her abdomen, digging around for something.
Click
Whirrrrrr…
It was the telltale sound of a Chronobot’s Temporal Integration Turbines coming to life.
He opened the door and stepped out into the hallway, Mr. Lady’s sister firmly in his grasp, which was impressive considering how much blood and slippery body ooze there was at that moment.
“When are you taking me?” she asked, in between gurgly noises. Asking “when” instead of “where” was common among Chronobots, given their ability to be in times and places of their choosing. Alas, it also lead to a lot of confusion among mortal men when they found out they were going home alone that night.
“Far, far into the future,” he replied. “Really far.”
I watched as the space-time continuum bent around the two of them, warping reality and the flow of minutes, until they were absorbed in an orb of platinum light. Moments later, they vanished with a polite “pop!”
I knew in my heart of hearts this could not be the real Retropolitan. After all, it’s not easy to hide the fact that you’re a Nazi vampire from the future, although having never been one, I admit this was merely conjecture on my part.
So, things were not looking good. The Retropolitan was still missing. Mr. Lady’s sister was horribly wounded and in the capture of time-traveling National Socialist Nosferatus. And I had a Reuben-shaped bruise on my face.
On the bright side, one thing became clear: he was singing “Green Eyes” by Jimmy Dorsey.
…to be continued…
* However, I do count among my talents a vast store of knowledge about “international producers of ladies undergarments” and “home phlebotomy for fun and profit.”
The Retropolitan went missing. Andy received an encryptogram. Mr. Lady did too. They met up, but not the Retropolitan, because he was still missing. Adventure and hilarity and near nudity ensued. Exciting lands and non-descript Finnish waiters were encountered. Things exploded. Plans came together. Mr. Lady wasn’t really Mr. Lady, but remained delightfully shaggable nonetheless. The Retropolitan was drunk in Nazi custody.
And it all ended up like this:
The Retropolitan stirred….
And now, or soon, I guess, the saga continues…
That’s right, gang, I’m workin’ like a crazy man this week, so I don’t know when (or if) I’ll get a chance to post anything. Or at least anything worth reading. I’ll be back as soon as I can.
In the meantime, here’s the opening credits to the 1980 Terence Hill film Super Fuzz:
There’s some crazy stuff in that movie. Seriously.