Foreword
What
follows is an excerpt from a forthcoming publication of such intellectual heft
that it cannot be hefted or toted or otherwise lugged around, and all the
more less so in hardcover: Third World Man, the long-awaited magnum
opus of the recently late Dr. J. Edmund Postfrock - Untenured Professor
Emeritus at Slippery Rock University - whose life's work laid the foundation
for a vibrant new field of thought that has continued to flourish in the wake
of his untimely passing: neoarchaeology (literally: the study
of the newly ancient).
Not to be
confused or conflated with neoclassicism, postmodernism, or antique collecting, neoarchaeology is
the discipline that concerns itself with the analysis of structures,
institutions, and individuals that have attained a kind of chintzy
obsolescence in the very prime of their youth. Dr. Postfrock's concept
of chintzy obsolescence - the essence of the neoarchaeological
object - will be unfamiliar to the uninitiated, but happily (or perhaps otherwise)
our hyper-attentive attention-deficit-disordered world is crammed to the
margins with textbook examples.
Structurally,
one might think of a 47-story apartment building that crumbles to dust just as
the red, red ribbon is clipped in half by a short, unctuous man sporting a
nasty combover and wielding a pair of novelty-sized plastic scissors. (I am
told that such occurrences are commonplace in mainland China.)
Institutionally speaking, the United States Congress springs to mind.
When it comes to individuals - and here the reader must draw from his or her
own Rolodex® - the neoarchaeological man (though not always a man, he does
often tend to be a man) is a man who, through disorganized living or dissolute
behavior, or by the repeated bungling of opportunities, or by the repeated
bungling of romances, or at any rate by the repeated bungling of something or
other, has so bungled his time on earth that his worldly possessions (up to and
including his life) might reasonably be thought of as historical artifacts.
Dr.
Postfrock was not, himself, a neoarchaeological man. It might be said that he
was the very antithesis thereof. "One must be a living man and a
posthumous artist," wrote Jean Cocteau - but if ever there was a man who
disproved Cocteau's premise; if ever there was a man who reveled in the spoils
of his own artistry prehumously, if that is a word; if ever there was such a
man, that man was Postfrock. He lived long enough to see his work canonized and
revered and photocopied without express written consent. He was a social amuse-bouche wherever
he went, on campus or off. Fawned over by nubile doctoral candidates, beckoned
by cleavage-bearing librarians, romanticized and mythologized in the press,
Postfrock was painted into the stuff of legend, a "real live Indiana
Jones," a rogue anthropologist and dogged hunter of rare and precious and
unattainable (or maritally inconvenient) treasures.
As his
editor and closest non-female companion, I can assure you that these popular
caricatures of Dr. Postfrock are at best innocuous distortions, and at worst
total slander.
Postfrock
was not of an especially adventurous disposition. He was terrified of walking,
never mind flying. He was no Indiana Jones, not even a North Dakota Jones.
The artifacts he sought after were regular old "things" that nobody
in their right mind would consider precious. His Rushmores were the mundane,
the commonplace, the eminently replicable bric-à-brac of the modern world. He collected these
objects, archived them, and studied them with the sort of intensity one finds
only in mystics and the clinically insane, though he was most assuredly
neither. Truth be told, he was a very bland man. Postfrock was, to deploy a
couple of crudities, a collector of "junk," an historical
"hoarder" - but it was the torrent of banal insights yielded by his
decades of tedious research that gave rise to and nourished the then inchoate,
now burgeoning field of neoarchaeology: a word that Postfrock never once used, in
speech or in print, but one that has come to be tethered to his name, in much
the same way that we think of Darwin as the father of evolution, even though
the great naturalist much preferred the phrase "descent with modification."
Postfrock
was infatuated with ears. "Fifty-one percent of discovery," he was
fond of saying, "is keeping one's ears clean." To this end, his desk
drawer was always filled to overflowing with Q-tips®. His office trash cans
were filled to overflowing with rather grodier incarnations of same. Once
swabbed, Postfrock believed in keeping his ears occupied. Among his many
eccentricities, he had at any given time no fewer than five land lines in his
office. He would conduct several conversations at once, not unlike the way you
or I might mingle at a cocktail party. Except he did this sort of thing in his
office. On multiple phones. Which was very weird to watch. And even weirder to
listen to. But it was this aural openness that sustained Dr. Postfrock's long
career and ultimately led him to excavate his greatest excavation, the Tomb of
the Third World Man, and later to compose what I believe will be the work that
preserves his legacy as a man of letters: Third World Man - the
story of the sad, chintzily obsolete ghost whose chintzily obsolete life it was
Postfrock's calling to comprehend.
It is
worth noting that Postfrock - who passed away of an unspecified illness at the
age of 73 - was very much a product of his generation, and of his nationality.
He was a proud Briton, of the imperialist sort. I do not know for certain, but
I have reason to assume that Postfrock voted for Margaret Thatcher at least a
decade after the Iron Lady had retired from politics. Though Postfrock was
undeniably open of ear, he was on occasion somewhat closed of mind. Certain
dubious remarks with regard to race and gender may charitably be said to
"abound" in his writing, but it is my sincere hope that his readers -
scholars, students, and laymen alike - will entertain the late Dr. Postfrock's
more germane ideas with as clean a pair of ear canals as those which Postfrock
so obsessively-compulsively swabbed.
- Dr.
Lanny M. Mueller
Associate Professor of Neoarchaeology, Indiana University-Purdue
University Indianapolis
Third World Man
Loomings: The Third World
Man Makes Himself Known
I was
juggling three phone calls already - The One With My Wife, The One With My
Boss, and The One With AT&T® - when destiny reached me on line
four.
Destiny
wouldn't shut up. It is not my wont to be curt with fate, but bear in mind that
I have very delicate ear drums. I told the man on line four to shut up. Then I
encouraged him to shout more softly. He shouted sweet somethings in my ear.
Before long, I had lost all interest in the state of my wife's biweekly
meatloaf and the woeful constipated status of my tenure application; I no
longer shared AT&T®'s anxieties concerning my five-line telephone
setup. I deftly disposed of lines one through three. Click, clack,
clock. Then I urged the man on line four to speak more slowly, and
then to speak even more slowly than that, and then to speak in isolated
phonemes. I swabbed out both ears, and listened.
He was a
Mr. K, a high-ranking public official from a well-known country whose cuisine I
had oft enjoyed, but whose language I had yet to master and whose borders I had
never knowingly trespassed. Mr. K was all in a tizzy because his homeland,
after a grueling five-decade slog up the ladder of human progress, had taken a
rather dramatic and cartoonish tumble back down. The Republic of Mr. K had
gone from Australia to Zimbabwe in less than a month! I apologized for his
misfortune, and politely suggested that he look into a less politically
culpable line of work. Then I asked the esteemed Mr. K what any of this had to
do with me.
Lo, it was not internecine strife that had laid his proud nation so low, nor
could the blame be foisted upon any of the usual culprits: famine, plague,
drought, corruption, regime change, climate change, the free press, rampant
homosexuality - not even the Jews. No, what had tarnished his country's
newfound good standing was something that was "right up my pipe," as
Mr. K said, or "right down my alley," as I suspected he meant. His
beloved but besmirched motherland had gone from a first world posthistorical
darling to a third world failed state in the blink of an eye, all because of an
archaeological dig.
It
buggered my mind to imagine the sort of find that could reduce an
entire country's standard of living by .657 Human Development Index points.
Outside of mass graves (and we're talking some massive mass
graves, here) or thousands of kilotons of improperly disposed-of radioactive
waste, I could think of nothing.
I heard a click-clacking of keys on the other end of the line as Mr. K ran my
query through Google Translate.
"No
no graves," he said. "No no nuclear waste. Indubitably most
not."
Then he
added: "But something most akin to the waste."
"Do
tell."
"We
are find dead man in apartment," said Mr. K. "United Nation examine
the apartment. Examine the dead man. Now we a third world country. This reason
we call him - the Third World Man."
He
uttered the appellation with a kind of mystic reverence, then he grunted and
spat and (from the sounds of things) shook his jowls from side to side like a
cartoon dog until he had sufficiently recovered from his own mixed admiration
and disgust.
"Mr.
K," I said, "with all due respect," I said, "perhaps even
with some respect that is not quite due," I said, "what the devil is
it that you expect me to do about any of this?"
"You
are neo ... arcologist," he said, halfway between a statement and a
question.
"I
suppose that I am - though if you'd've bothered to read any of my work prior to
placing this call, you would know that I much prefer the term - "
"Come.
Dig. Look. Learn," said Mr. K. "Then make him go away."
"Who?"
"Third
World Man."
I sighed
but otherwise said nothing. My interest was piqued, but I was busy and I was
hungry and I was untenured and tired. I began to worry about the biweekly
meatloaf.
"You
not intrigue."
"No,
Mr. K. Believe me, I am. Quite so. But - "
"We
pay money. Many money."
"I
resent the implication. If you think that I'm the sort of academic who can be -
"
After I'd
successfully hung up, still shaking, I picked up the big red phone and collect
called my wife. She accepted the call. I told her to hold off on the biweekly
meatloaf.
"Honey
darling. Cataract of my eye. Girdle of my loins. Love of my life. Get
dressed," I said. "I'm taking you to Cracker Barrel®."
The Tomb of the Third World
Man
I have
always traveled lightly and this trip was to be no exception. I brought with me
one (1) EASTPAK® brand backpack containing three (3) changes of clean,
brief-cut Fruit of the Loom® brand underpants, fifteen (15) 50-ct. cases of
Twinings® English Breakfast, twenty-two (22) 170-ct. packs of Q-tip® brand
q-tips, and one (1) teaching assistant (not in the backpack (eminently portable
though he was)) named Tattoo.
Of Polynesian stock, Tattoo stood in stark contrast to the Brobdingnagian
inhabitants of those scattered isles; he stood, in fact, no higher than my belt
buckle, and that only when on tippy-toes. Other than the tea and the Q-tips® and
the underpants and the backpack itself, Tattoo was to prove himself the most
invaluable of carry-on luggage.
I have
never enjoyed flying, least of all by aeroplane, so I swallowed one (1) fistful
of Ativan® tablets, as prescribed by my family physician. Though there must
have been several layovers, I do not remember any of them. Tattoo revived me
with smelling salts as we were taxiing towards the gate of our final
destination. Deplane, he cried, deplane! Upon
deplaning ourselves, Tattoo and I were ushered onto a chopper by a phalanx of
Master's students who gun-barrel-prodded one's abdomen rather too forcefully
for one's liking. The chopper choppered us over countless clicks of Nam-green
canopy until we landed in a clearing. After we'd dechoppered ourselves, we were
escorted by several heavily armed interns to a Jeep® and we rode in the Jeep®
for close to twelve hours before we arrived at a nameless drool of a river
where me and Tattoo and our luggage were deJeep®ed and loaded onto a canoe. We
were canoed by canoeists - as part of some kind of academic work study - to the
site of the excavation site.
En route, while Tattoo snoozed, I tried to make chit-chat with the head
intern.
"What is your major, young man?" I asked him.
"What?"
he said.
"Your
major?"
"No,"
he said, "only lieutenant."
Having broken the ice, I inquired as to the whereabouts of the
esteemed Mr. K, our tour guide and supposed benefactor. This seemed to amuse
the interns. The head intern shrugged and replied with a monosyllable. I duly
punched the monosyllable into my Lingo® Voyager 6 translating device. "To
liquidate," it said. I pressed the "text-to-speech" button just
to make sure. LIQUIDATE. LIQUIDATE. LIQUIDATE. The robot voice had spoken. I
asked no further questions.
We
arrived. I smelling salted Tattoo. He squealed his way into wakefulness. We
decanoed and set off on foot. Tattoo and I were handed a pair of
government-issue Hello Kitty® respiratory masks - an unnecessary precaution, I
thought, as our interns were merely shielding their faces with shirt sleeves
and handkerchiefs. What was good enough for my AK-47 wielding interns, I
proclaimed, was good enough for me. But before we had even caught our first
glimpse of the condemned apartment complex on the hill, my legs turned to
rubber. I grew suddenly very queasy and my mucous membranes told me that the
Hello Kitty® respiratory masks were rather too skimpy for our purposes. I
availed myself of the M40 Field Protective Gas Mask that I still do not
remember purchasing at the duty free shop during our layover in Houston. In my
drug-induced fugue state, I had not thought to procure a child-sized GP-5 for
poor little Tattoo.
The
interns would go no further than the kerb at the edge of the parking lot. I
glanced back over my shoulder to see them grinning at me as they retched into
their handkerchiefs. Tattoo and I lurched across the parking lot like a couple
of drunk crabs. I kicked open the front door. We entered the building. No sign
of a lift. Taking the stairs, then, we shuddered our way up to the second
floor, where we were confronted with an iron door criss-crossed in yellow
caution tape: the modern bureaucratic analog of "abandon all hope ye who enter
here."
Tattoo glanced up at me. I glanced down at Tattoo. I nodded. He sighed and
sucked in his breath and waddled towards the door. He could not reach the
doorknob. I walked over and hoisted him up by the britches. He grabbed the knob
and dangled there. I retreated to the opposite end of the hallway to watch. The
door clicked open. Tattoo dropped down to his feet and stepped inside.
A beat.
Then there came a deafening scream, a murderous bellow so deep in the lower
register that I feared Tattoo had sonically exploded himself on the spot.
"Tattoo!" I cried, and ran in after him. Glancing around the living
room, I was convinced that Tattoo had indeed exploded after all, until he
tapped me on the thigh, looked up at me with a shrug and said, "It like
this when I got here."
I have
visited warzones. I have changed diapers. I have driven past Greyhound® bus
stations at night. Nothing could have prepared me for this.
The floor was covered in Mead® brand notebook paper, Nescafé® stained and cigarette burned
and graffitoed with the blue-black ink of no earthly script I ever hope to
become acquainted with. Rotten banana peels were stationed at intervals, like a
crash course for a clown. Cigarette butts blossomed mycologically from cups,
Thermos®es, Mason jars, soda cans, every sort of container imaginable but an
ashtray; the gnarled orange filters pointed accusingly at the heavens like the
smokestacks of a Dickensian dystopia written in an alternate universe where the
bad kind of LSD was synthesized in the early 19th century. Pools of blood, or
bile, or worse accentuated the wall-to-wall college-ruled carpet of filth. Dust
and dirt and dinge seemed to have chemically bonded with oxygen, forming
monster molecules that were perfectly visible with the naked eye, the electrons
shuddering in their orbits with audible disgust. The only air that was even
remotely breathable came with several tildes of pubic hair
attached, like the CV of Satan himself.
The stench had a character all its own: a high-pitched, almost whiny stench.
For reasons unknown, the German word peinlich sprang to my
mind, though it does not mean "whiny," nor can it be properly used to
describe any sort of stench. Except for, perhaps, this one.
I dry heaved, but kept it dry. Cringing my way through the haze, I could make
out a television in the distance, perched off-kilter atop a high fructose corn
syrup-encrusted DVD player. Reaching downward and stifling an uppity slug of
vomit, I pressed the EJECT button. Season 6 of LOST popped
out. I vomited. Tattoo, meanwhile, had flown into a panic.
De plague, he cried, de
plague!
He was
pointing across the room. I followed his abridged index finger to the object of
his horror: there, seated in his boxer shorts, in a swivel chair, across from a
Dell® Inspiron™ 1525 laptop with a Pentium® Dual Core 1.73 GHz processor,
was the Third World Man.
He was
smoking a cigarette.
"Back,
Tattoo!" I cried. "Let daddy take care of this."
Tattoo
raised a brow, never mind which one. I thighed him aside and approached the man
slowly, cougarlike. With fingers like tweezers, I snatched the cigarette from
the man's empurpled lips. I lifted up my gas mask and took a good long drag.
"American
Spirit®," I said. "Organic Full-Bodied. Maroon pack. Slow
burners."
"He
dead?" asked Tattoo.
"Very
much so," I said.
"How
long?"
"Years.
At least three of them, I'd guess."
"But
he still smoking!"
"No,"
I said. "He just quit."
I sucked
the cigarette between my lips.
"You
ever smoked an American Spirit®, Tattoo?"
Tattoo
shook his head.
"Would
you like to?"
Tattoo
shook his head again, more vigorously this time.
Purging
myself had effected a marked decrease in nausea, and the carcinogens supplied
by the American Spirit® helped my nervous system acclimate itself to the
oppressive atmosphere of the Third World Man's tomb. To Tattoo, too, two
minutes or so was sufficient for him to regain his wits and breathe more
easily. He adjusted quickly, perhaps owing to his undersized lungs, which may
have filtered out some of the larger stink particles - or more probably because
he was accustomed to such squalor, given the profoundly unhygienic cultural
milieu of his native Polynesia.
"Tattoo,"
I said, "hand me a Q-tip® brand q-tip."
Unzipping
and rummaging through my EASTPAK® brand backpack, the pygmy placed the
double-swabbed cotton swab in my hand. I swabbed.
"What
we do now, boss man?" asked Tattoo.
"Now,"
I said, "we snoop."
I pressed
the space bar of the Third World Man's laptop and found that it was password
protected.
"Tattoo,"
I said, chasing a hunch, "be a dear and dust off the Third World Man's
t-shirt, will you?"
It was
just as I had suspected: the Third World Man was a Radiohead fan. I guessed his
password on the third try.
Selected Google Searches of
the Third World Man
what
happens when two identical twins have a baby?
what
happens when the babies of identical twins have babies?
how many
fireflies in a mason jar are enough to light up a room?
can you
breathe through your belly button?
can you
eat your own flesh?
can I eat
my own flesh?
what time
is it?
where are
my keys?
google
why?
LOST
season 7
who is
lady gogo?
who is
lady gaga?
what is
this rash on my leg?
what is
this rash on my face?
how to
clean
maid
services
slave
services
arson
odds of getting caught
what is a
3d printer?
how much
is a 3d printer?
where can
I buy a 3d printer?
can you
use a 3d printer to print out food?
nearest
24 hour McDonald's®
what is
sideboob?
sideboob
pictures
Excavating the Tomb of the
Third World Man
Over the
weeks that followed, the erstwhile abandoned parking lot of the Tomb of the
Third World Man came alive with the staccato ping-pong catcalls of coolies and
the seismological shuddering of cargo trucks rumbling to and fro. Wherever Mr.
K was or wasn't, his people had come through. There were whole fleets of
specially modified garbage trucks - hermetically resealable, boasting three
times the carrying capacity of your garden variety Bruder Scania® R-Series -
and likewise tricked-out battalions of tanker trucks, outfitted with fire hoses
and 3,800 liters of highly pressurized Febreze® SPORT Laundry Odor Elimination
Boost™. We were simultaneously deconstructing and reconstructing the Tomb of
the Third World Man.
Tattoo,
uniquely possessed of a photographic memory (Polynesians are notorious among
evolutionary phrenologists for their low-capacity RAMpacks), internalized the
exact disarray of the Tomb, later to recreate it in a floating shipping
container stationed in international waters, some 250 nautical miles off the
east coast of our host country to remain nameless. There, Tattoo and I availed
ourselves of a virtually unlimited amount of time to "snoop around"
the Third World Man's tattered and mouldy possessions, and to slowly piece
together the life that he had so diligently rent asunder. (His original tomb,
duly Febreze®d, was rented out to a family of six the following weekend. We did
not receive any sort of commission.)
We went
to work. Most informative for our purposes were the piles of documents
recovered from the original excavation site: journals, diaries, doodles, Google
Chat transcripts, cybersex transcripts, bowel movement logs, and half-completed
job applications. Tattoo - commanding his army of coolies with perhaps (if it
is possible) a little too much zeal - ensured that every crumpled grad school
application, every unanswered missive, every self-obsessed journal entry was
archived, transcribed, then re-crumpled and carefully scattered to its original
place of displacement. One afternoon, Tattoo, squinting at an especially
puzzling printed page, held it up for my inspection and asked, "What
speaky-speaky this?"
I read a
sentence or two. Then I fell asleep standing up. Tattoo revived me with the
smelling salts.
"Wakey wakey boss."
I vomited.
"Thanks,
Tattoo. Now what were you saying?"
"What
speaky-speaky this?"
"What
language does it look like, Tattoo?"
"Might
could be fuckin' Japanese for all Tattoo know," he scoffed.
"No,
Tattoo," I chuckled. "It is neither Japanese nor Chinese nor Portuguese.
It's the worst ese there is."
"...
disease?"
"It's legalese."
Tattoo
shook his head, unable to comprehend my drift.
"Our
Third World Man," I explained, "was a Peace Corps volunteer."
An Excerpt from the Diary
of the Third World Man
I sleep in
squalor. I awake in same. My apartment is big enough for a family of six,
provided at least one of them lived like an actual human being. But I am one
man, and I have not.
The floorspace is subdivided into autonomous zones of garbage. They no longer
belong to me, are outside my jurisdiction, have fallen siege to the muttering
hordes of entropy. All that remains of my crumbling empire is the deflated air
mattress that I can no longer sleep on (for reasons I mentioned earlier, dear
Diary) and the heap of musty blankets on the floor under the AC unit that I
curl up into these days. All else is lost.
Across the room, staring into my soul, is the big black bag that contains all the
stuff I didn't throw away the last time I tried to clean my room six months
ago. I'd like not to think or talk about The Bag. The bookshelf now doubles as
a cupboard for unwashed and orphaned tableware. Untouchables. That's what I
call them, in my mind. What used to be spacious, human-appropriate rooms are
now clogged and uninhabitable cells, unworthy of a trash panda (TWM's
personal slang for "raccoon" - JEP). Innumerable islands of dirty
clothes and Assorted Shit dot the floor like a Micronesia of Filth.
The lone silver lining in all of this is that last week I finally summoned the
courage to dispose of the lime green nylon mesh tube where I used to stash my
dirty clothes. I don't know where I got the damned thing, or why it ever seemed
like a good idea to get it. It used to dangle from a Chinese lantern that
itself dangled from the ceiling and the fusion of light and stink attracted the
flies in kamikaze droves ...
The Innovative Third World
Man
There is
a peculiar sort of genius that arises out of extreme idiocy. It is a
two-steps-forward, fifteen-steps-back sort of genius, but a sort of genius
nonetheless. Stupidity can sometimes breed innovation, the kind of innovation
necessary to cover up stupidity and allow for more stupidity, which breeds
still more innovation, and stupidity, and so on. In this way, the late Third World Man was a
kind of slob savant.
After
several months camped out with Tattoo in our odorous catacomb on the sea, I
began to see the world as the Third World Man had once seen it. His crusty
microcosm started to make sense to me. I quit bathing, unquit smoking. For
hours at a time, I would speak to myself with his tongue. It was in one of
these strange, trancelike existential proxy states that I came across perhaps
the most astounding of the Third World Man's inventions.
Tattoo, playing Grand Theft Auto® on an especially torrid afternoon, discovered
that the Third World Man's laptop tended to overheat and shut down before he
(Tattoo) could amass two stars (indicative of a mild-to-moderate police
deployment). This put him in an especially foul mood; Polynesians, as a people,
are insufferable without the regular catharsis afforded by virtual road rage.
To counter this ill effect, Tattoo (with my assistance) plugged in the air
conditioning unit mounted to the wall above the computer and, utilizing the
remote control I'd found wrapped in a pair of soiled boxer briefs, I switched
it on. Eventually, the computer room cooled down and this sustained GTA well
enough, but within minutes, a foul-smelling, ominously clear liquid began
oozing down from the AC unit and spreading across the floor. And within
seconds, a downstairs neighbor was knocking on the wall of our container. I
took a step towards the knocking, then I froze. Clearly, this didn't make any
sense: there was no downstairs, thus there could be no downstairs
neighbor. Tattoo, grokking the absurdity, held out both hands
palm-upward and shook them around: the traditional Polynesian gesture of incredulity.
Shrugging, I walked across the living room and cracked open the hatch. It would
have been impolite to do otherwise.
"Hello,"
I said.
The
downstairs neighbor was not pleased. I was able to pluck the words
"water" and "ceiling" and "foreign devil-buffoon"
from his diatribe. I apologized, and felt somewhat guilty, but I was far more
troubled by the appearance of a downstairs neighbor where there was no
corresponding downstairs apartment.
"I'm
terribly sorry," I said, "but we are in a shipping container in the
middle of the ocean. It is rather impossible that you are here right now."
He did
not understand this, so I had Tattoo punch the message into my trusty Lingo®
Voyager 6. He toggled the "robotic voice" feature and pressed
"speak." The downstairs neighbor listened to the robot. He nodded
grimly. He waved goodbye. Then he evaporated.
This discontinuity did not exactly put us in a comfortable place. Tattoo and I
spent that night huddled together in a single sleeping bag and surrounded by
flashlights. I have not yet lived out my time on this planet, but the incident
I just described may turn out to be the lone inexplicable occurrence of my
life, the one moment I happened to catch a glimpse of the Pilot of the Universe
asleep at the wheel - but as it is tangential to our excavation of the Tomb, I
will have to remain satisfied to explore the mystery in a book to be written
much, much later.
Back to
the Third World Man and his genius. Pieces of his junk puzzle were falling into
place. The next day, in the computer room, I called Tattoo's attention to a
seemingly worthless configuration of plastic doohickeys, electrical cables,
clothespins, and coathangers that dangled from a Chinese lantern that itself
dangled from the ceiling.
"What
do you reckon this is?" I asked Tattoo.
"Look
like a bunch of crap to me, boss."
"Laptop
overheats," I murmured to myself, channeling TWM, my eyeballs rolling back
into my head. "Laptop overheats, thus air conditioning. But air
conditioning emits foul-smelling liquid. Thus flooding. Thus irate
sixth-dimensional downstairs neighbor. But laptop overheats. Grand Theft Auto®
is on laptop. Porn is on laptop. Impossible! Unsustainable!"
Guided by
forces beyond my understanding, I ran my fingertips along the hunk of dangling
junk until I found what appeared to be a rotten potato mounted to its
hindquarters.
"Please
not eat, boss," said Tattoo.
"Why,"
I cried, "this potato is not for eating! This potato is for power!"
I pressed
the potato down onto a pair of metal prongs and twisted it. Then, through some
minor electrochemical miracle, a robotic arm protruded from the hitherto
meaningless device, deploying a small plastic fan that, once it had come to
rest at its optimum angle, whirled to life and began to inundate the silicon
innards of the laptop with porn-sustaining zephyrs of cool, disgusting air.
"Wow,"
muttered Tattoo, "that stupid."
"No,
little Tattoo," I said, patting him on the head. "That's brilliant."
He
shrugged and fired up the computer. I took a shower - my first in months - and
then I settled into the Third World Man's deflated inflatable mattress. And
while I lay awake marveling at the mind of the exquisite corpse rotting in the
next room, the night cricketed and sang, alive with the music of squealing
tires and chirruping prostitutes begging for mercy.
Noteworthy Artifacts of the
Third World Man
One (1)
TROJAN® Pleasure Pack™ Lubricated Condoms - 36 ct. - unopened
Sixteen
(16) clovis point arrowheads
Three (3)
bludgeoning tools - flint - ostensibly for the crushing and mashing of grains
One (1)
necklace of human ears
Six (6)
seasons of LOST - DVD, bootleg, several key episodes missing
One (1)
Wendy's® Big Bacon Classic™ - of indeterminate age (results of carbon date
pending) - half-eaten - no outward sign of putrefaction
One-thousand
nine-hundred and twenty-two (1,922) pogs bearing designs ranging from the
highest of the highbrow - a limited-edition Michel Foucault slammer - to the
lowest of the lowbrow - "Have A Nice Trip," depicting a
"doobie" smoking skateboarder plummeting headfirst down a stairwell
One (1) pistachio nut cookie - cellophane-wrapped -
autographed by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg - Ms. Ginsburg's desk
did not return our phone calls re: why the Third World Man owned an autographed
cookie of hers, though the autograph has since been verified as authentic
Eight (8) bottles of Elmer's® Glue-All - tainted with
infusions of variously coloured ink
Five-hundred and seventy-one (571) off-brand disposable
lighters
$9,371.52 (USD) in loose change
One (1) copy of First
World Man by Yours Truly - Penguin
Press, 2005 - the story of
the world's tidiest man, Janus Magnussen of Denmark - while I am flattered that
the Third World Man was acquainted with my work, it does not appear that he
read any of it - my book was perhaps the cleanest object he owned
One (1)
copy of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - First
Paperback Edition - Back Bay Books, 2006 - heavily and pretentiously annotated
by the owner - fair condition; knife wound to solar plexus of book; wound
persists until page 639; cover is missing; otherwise eminently readable -
$10.99 OBO
A Second Excerpt from the
Journal of the Third World Man
There is
a frameless mirror slouched up against the wall, like a portal to another,
equally disgusting dimension where all the crap on the floor is reversed. There
is everywhere a constant droning, as though someone is drilling into cement. It
assails me at all hours, from all sides. Impossible to tell whether it is a
winged insect infestation, or if the drone is coming from inside my own
skull.
There is a long hardwood desk where I do my paperwork. The desk is cluttered
with triple-folded applications, expired US passports, torn out notebook pages
bearing the crossed-out names and phone numbers of people who might be able to
bail me out of jams. There are half-eaten foil-wrapped bricks of rotten
HERSHEY'S® chocolate, stray Jolly Rancher®s that have chemically bonded with
the table, scattered bits of plastic that once belonged to expensive
technological equipment that I have destroyed ...
The place
is so sloppy that I can no longer tell if it's getting better or worse, whether
I am having a positive or negative impact upon the overall level of entropy. It
is not thermodynamically impossible, not exactly, that the apartment might
spontaneously clean itself one day. The kitchen floor seems to be getting
progressively stickier; I mopped it once, but that only made things worse. It
is impossible to ignore the fruit flies. Maybe they followed me over from
America. Or probably they lived somewhere outdoors and mass migrated into my
kitchen when I arrived. I didn't really notice them until now. Fruit flies
become more noticeable as you go along. The Stink works the opposite way. You
notice The Stink the first time you enter a room and notice it less and less
every day after that, until the only people who notice The Stink are those
unfortunate souls who come over to visit, or the people who are buying your
drinks, because by then, The Stink is on you ...
The Generous Third World
Man
Our
research kept us occupied for the better part of three years. We remained
offshore, contained in our container, rummaging and ruminating. During this
time, Tattoo and I held a peculiar place in the hearts of the natives. We were
friendly guests who should have been hailed as heroes, but we were regarded as
intruders, as a kind of superfluous, potentially malignant growth on the hide
of the body politic.
Yes, we
should have been hailed as heroes. As a direct result of our research, the
country to remain nameless leapfrogged back to international respectability.
With the Third World Man and his Tomb safely disposed of - or at least removed
to an environmentally kosher distance - the national HDI had shot up a full
.627 points, very nearly back to its original place of first world good
standing. Meanwhile, the GDP had more than doubled. Formerly dependent upon its
vast reserves of slave labor and synthetic cannabinoids, the country to remain
nameless was now making a veritable mint in recycled liquor bottles, beer cans,
used clothing, and bootleg DVDs. We were in no way rewarded for our
contributions to national prosperity, but rather grudgingly allowed to do our
mysterious and arcane scholarly work in abject solitude. Every so often, a
stray shell from a passing gunship reminded us that our work visas were set to
expire.
Mother
Academia was rather more appreciative of our efforts. No fewer than 500 new
species - some 237 new microorganisms, 99 fungi, 43 arthropods, six reptiles,
four rodents, two avians, and an unknown variety of feral cat (later returned
to its rightful owner, a shopkeeper down the road) - were classified from the
samples we sent home. All of these creatures are unprecedented discoveries,
given their habitat: they are the most extreme of extremophiles, each one
a testament to the resourcefulness of life. Many
of them have since proven medicinally (or otherwise) intriguing.
Take - to name but one example - tholoma kasemium, popularly known as the AM/FM radiolarian. This rare
beast - unique among all life forms, save for my wife (who has a metal plate in
her skull (installed after an Original Frisbee® Disc accident in the late 1970s)) - can transmit radio waves, albeit over a fairly
limited range (.6 mm). None of the stations it gets are very good, and the
little bugger seems to have a distinct fondness for Rush Limbaugh, but this is
a minor and rectifiable flaw. With a few slight genetic tweaks, we might one
day introduce the world of microfauna to the soporific pleasures of the John
Tesh Radio Show.
Consider the wheeled paramecium, the only microorganism that doubles as an
all-terrain vehicle. Or leptotrichia autophagia, the bacteria that eats itself and, just before the
last bite, spawns a clone: this means that at any given time, there is exactly
only one of these creatures in existence, so we were very lucky
to have found it. Consider desulfurobacterium orbisonium, the bacteria that subsists on human tears. Or the
rakish amoeba, a charmingly nondescript blob that ambulates not with flagella
but with a cane, can doff its pseudopod and wink at you with its vacuole.
I even named one of my discoveries - unofficially the world's smallest bacteria
- after little Tattoo! Mycoplasma tattooium, only .07 µm in length! I am told that
it is one of the most worthless microorganisms known to science. There remains
some small debate as to whether it is even alive. One unfortunate population of
laboratory rats injected with mini-Tattoos did succumb to a fatal illness some
hours later, but my colleague Dr. Lohman at the University of Rutgers has since
pointed out that those same rats had ransacked his lab assistant's Long
John Silver's® Whitefish
Basket™ earlier in the afternoon. In any case, Tattoo did not share my
enthusiasm for his being immortalized in the Big Book of Linnaeus. He possesses
a modesty commensurate with the size of his island.
One
species of bacteria in particular - whose proper name I am not at liberty to
disclose - seems to have attracted the attention of the people at The Pentagon.
It was found that even small intravenous doses of said bacteria, without fail,
triggered the rapid onset of a never-before-seen type of cancer: carcicarcinoma, or
"cancer of the cancer." One-hundred percent of the inoculated rats
developed tumors that developed tumors. Strangely, this did not kill them,
merely rendered them lumpy and irritable. Oncology is not my bag, so I will not
speculate as to the potential long-term benefits or consequences of
meta-metastasis, or as to whether our little unicellular friend will be used to
beneficent or nefarious ends. Suffice it to say that I do not expect to be
compensated in any way by the people at The Pentagon.
Among the new avians: the sweet and sour chicken, which stands to revolutionize
the American food service industry.
Among the new insects, a peculiar breed of fruit fly (drosophila drosophoba) the fruit fly who is afraid of fruit. Healthy eating
is an acquired taste, but this puzzling creature, having acquired that taste
over the course of several billion years, managed to lose his appetite in a
matter of months - and having wallowed in the Sty of the Third World Man for
just over three years, I can't really say that I blame the guy.
A Song Composed by the
Third World Man
"FRUIT
FLIES"
♪ = 126
Andante grazioso, con repugnanza
(to the tune of "Blue Skies," comp. 1926 by Irving
Berlin, though the 1935 Benny Goodman arrangement is very much preferred)
fruit
flies
smilin'
at me
nothin'
but fruit flies
do I see
Reflections on the Third
World Man
Given his
remarkable Pigpen-like capacity for carrying his cloud of filth wherever he
went, even past the surly customs officials of the many countries he lived and
died in, it should not come as too surprising that many of the Third World
Man's documents predated his Peace Corps service. Parking tickets from his
rocky, civic duty-neglecting adolescence; principal's office summonses from the
prepubescent dark ages of his public education; love letters from girls who
still dotted their i's with hearts. But most revealing of all were the records
the Third World Man kept of his elementary school humiliations. The Third World
Child was indeed the father of the Third World Man. A prolific writer -
though a predictably illegible handwriter - the Third World Child, in
ever-narrowing notebook ruling, chronicled the development of the quirk that
was to become his lifelong bugaboo. (In the entries below, the "backwards
lowercase e" has been represented with an italicized uppercase E.)
2nd Grade - MissEs [sic] Lovanos [sic] Class
Today
MissEs Lovano found the trash in my desk and got angry and kickEd
it over. It went all ovEr. EvEry body laugfEd [sic]. I cryEd
[sic]. She made me so I pickEd up the trash.
3rd Grade - Mrs. Bigby's
Class
Stu and
me were mixeing [sic] the glue with the blue ink from the pen when Mrs. Bigby
asked me what we were doing. I didnt [sic] say a thing and she saw my face is
red and then she saw in my desk and got angry and kicked it over. The trash
went all over the floor. Everybody laughed at me. I had to get on the floor to
pick up the trash and it took a very long time.
4th Grade - Ms.
McDowell's Class
Weird
thing happened today. But I guess it's kind of normal. I was sitting in the
back minding my own business when Ms. McDowell came up shreeking [sic] like
Godzilla and went crazy and told me to clean my desk. I looked into my desk and
I knew it would take a long time to clean. I said OK anyway and took out the
glue bottle and then a bunch of paper came out like a [sic] avelanche [sic] but
not all of it. So Ms. McDowell went even crazyer [sic] and kicked my desk over.
Trash went flying all over the place. Everyone laughed at me, even Stu. I got
down on the floor and picked up the pieces of my life and looked up to Heaven
and asked, Why me?
5th Grade - Mrs.
Lancaster's Class
For the
fifth time in as many weeks, havoc was reeked [sic] upon my desk by none other
than Mrs. L. It used to be like a running joke but now it is like a running
joke that has gotten tired of running. Paper balls rolling like tumbleweed all
over the floor. Something like six Elmer's Glue Bottles came flying out. I even
found a sock in there but I swear it isn't mine. Everyone turned around to
stare and my face turned bright red as usual and Mrs. L just waited and tapped
her foot and even Jeb Staple (the kid I told you about who asked the dentist
when he came for National Dental Hygene [sic] Month if you could die by choking
on your own tooth) was getting angry because I was "disrepressing him from
learnding." Anyway, Journal, I don't know why I brought this up. I guess I
just wanted to say that sometimes I feel like the universe is ploting [sic]
against me.
6th Grade - Miss Grud's
Class
I'm not
exactly the tidiest kid on earth. I'll admit that. But I'm a good student. I do
my homework. I get straight A's, except for math, which I always get a B-plus
in, and handwriting, which I have never done better than a C-minus in, but
that's neither here or [sic] there. (Who needs handwriting anyway, am I write?
Ha ha ha.) Anyway, all I'm saying is that I'm a pretty good kid and I do my
work and I never talk in class. If I have a messy desk, so what? Who cares?
It's not a big deal. So I'm a little disorganized. But if you give me recess
time and a flashlight, I can find any piece of homework from the past six
months of school. And who else in class can say that? I don't see what the big
deal is. But to make a long story short: Miss "Crud" kicked my desk
over today, with her annoying high-heels (who is she trying to impress? her
boyfriend? ha ha ha) and all heck broke loose. D.J. Mothbach called me a sloppy
buttmunch (but nobody heard it except for me) and even The Omnivore and Beluga
Boy were laughing at me, which was embarassing [sic] to say the least. I don't
know why I do this to myself. Maybe I'll just get a maid one day. Or maybe
everyone should just eat my shorts. Ha ha ha.
Over
these five years, we observe a refinement in writing technique and a maturation
in abstract thought, but no approach whatsoever to the resolution of what seems
a rather basic problem: the messy desk; the messy life. Instead, like a bonzai
bush or an ingrown toenail, the Third World Child's blossoming intellect turned
inward and applied itself to the problem of how best to ignore the
problem. This neat trick was achieved in the usual Freudian ways: an
inferiority/superiority complex cocktail - blushing, scrabbling around on the
floor after scattered garbage, gracefully absorbing the opprobrium of his
teacher and classmates while acting the martyr in private - followed by
projection - first upon the divine and then, having outgrown God, upon the
universe and then, having accepted the universe as the ultimately unimpeachable
void that it is, upon society as a whole - and in the end, by the development
of a kind of pun-riddled humour about the problem that amounted to a flat-out
denial that there was a problem. It was not the Third World Child's problem,
after all, but his classmates' inability to comprehend "how he works"
that was the problem.
Alas, for as smart as he grew, and for as worldly as he became, it was this
childhood hangup - the inability to clean up after himself - that would
one day lead to his ignominious demise.
It is not my intention to oversimplify the Third World Man, or to spell out his
thought processes line by line like a BASIC program, but having slept in his
filth for over three years, I daresay that I understand him better than anyone
else ever will.
Those acquainted with computer programming will be familiar with the idea
of recursion: the act of applying an equation or a program to
itself. If the initial output of a program is the number 12, then the number 12
is fed back into the program, which yields a second result, which is fed back
into the program, and so on, ad infinitum. It is not difficult to imagine why recursive
programs have a tendency of getting out of hand.
The Third World Man was just such a program. While he was certainly a slob -
perhaps the greatest slob who has ever lived - he was also rather genteel. (He
wrote, in a 7th grade journal entry, that his English teacher had called him
"a gentile" during class; though the Third World Teen was very much a goy,
he had never been called one before, and it confused him deeply; what did it
matter that he wasn't Jewish? I believe it is safe to assume that the Third
World Teen looked up the wrong word in the dictionary.)
I invite you to imagine the genteel, delicate Third World Man, freshly arrived
in a new country and a new apartment, everything clean as a whistle. As will
happen in a chaotic universe, within a day or two, a bit of clutter would
accumulate. "I should clean this up," the Third World Man would think
to himself, "but I do so hate getting my hands dirty. Maybe
tomorrow." And so he would neglect cleaning, for the purpose of keeping
himself clean. Before long, after a week or two, his living quarters would have
become truly vile, borderline unlivable. But by then, the filth was several
orders of magnitude filthier, and thus much more disgusting to the genteel
Third World Man, and thus much less cleanable, and thus more worthy of being
put off until the next day, or week, or month. And so on exponentially. In this
way - and not out of sheer laziness - did the Third World Man die of squalor,
succumbing to his own desire for personal cleanliness.
There was, too, the matter of having people over. The more often he had people
over, the more often he would have to clean. Having people over was, perhaps,
the one means he had of tricking himself into cleaning. But the messier his
apartment grew, the less possible it was to clean, the less possible it was to
have people over, the less possible it was to get motivated to clean, and so
on. Past a certain threshold of sloppiness, he simply gave up on having people
over, which allowed the apartment to truly go to seed. Towards the end, he
never let anyone in at all. He received visitors in the hallway, with a harried
look on his face, as though there were a corpse rotting in the room just over
his shoulder, a suspicion that many of his companions entertained. When Tattoo
and I crashed his pad, I believe we were the first visitors he'd had in years -
and by then, the corpse was his own.
Parting Ways with the Third
World Man, and Autopsy
With our
work winding down, I began to piece together a lecture series while Tattoo
succumbed to distractions of a rather less pedagogical nature. I had known (or
rather, assumed beforehand) that he was addicted to gambling. I was unaware,
however, that he was not as shrewd as his islandmates, which is to say that he
was a very bad gambler. When gambling wasn't going well he resorted to drinking
and when drinking wasn't going well he resorted to whoring and when whoring
wasn't going well he resorted to fighting. And fighting, for poor little
Tattoo, never went well. Our departure, then, was accelerated, for reasons I
can only allude to. We had worn out our welcome on the mainland and our safety
in international waters was precarious at best - so we prepared for our return
to America.
Seven oil
tankers were retrofitted to carry the toxic archaeological waste that was our
express cargo. Flanked by two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, they set off on a
three-week journey over the ocean. The terminus of that voyage was the Patapsco
Terminal in Baltimore, Maryland.
I
insisted, to Tattoo's undisguised annoyance, that the Third World Man was to be
kept on or near our persons until we were completely finished with him.
Fortunately, empurpled lips aside, his corpse was remarkably well-preserved and
exhibited very few signs of putrefaction: a minor forensic miracle that I
attribute to the high formaldehyde content of the potent liquors so beloved by
the people of the nation in which he so squalorously served out his final
years.
We were able to smuggle the Third World Man aboard an Emirates Air flight to
Chicago, and none of our fellow passengers in coach were the wiser, though
Tattoo aired some misgivings about having to sit next to him for the duration.
My colleagues back home, upon learning of this escapade, made frequent
allusions to the classic American novella Weekend at Bernie's, but
I am not familiar with the text and, at my age, do not expect to find the time
or the patience necessary to become acquainted with it.
After
tossing down a few celebratory cocktails at the Chicago O'Hare VIP lounge, our
slightly necrotic charge was boxed and shipped out to the Public Archaeology
Laboratory in Pawtucket, Massachusetts, where a full forensic autopsy was
administered over the course of two years. Certain findings were surprising to
me, while others were not. I wasn't exactly gobsmacked to discover, for
instance, that the Third World Man had died of exposure in his apartment, or
that his diet had consisted almost exclusively of Pringles® brand potato
chips (of the Salt & Vinegar persuasion). It was, however, somewhat
flummoxing when the Third World Man's age was variously reported as
"twelve" (frontal cortex), "57" (amygdala, basal ganglia),
"239" (skin, nerve tissue), and a whopping "3.7 × 1012" (liver, lungs, genitals),
pending the results of a more conclusive round of radiocarbon dating.
As for
me, I yet remain among the living, 73 years old and fighting hard to preserve
that age - though I am not likely to indulge in the sort of liquid taxidermy
practiced by the self-medicating Third World Man. I am kept busy by my
research, by my students and my phone calls, by my graduate assistants and my
wife's biweekly meatloaf (dread it though I do) and my freshly minted third
grandchild (adore her as I must). I have not heard from Tattoo in a long time,
and feel somewhat guilty for not having kept in touch, but I must console
myself with a platitude of my own coinage: men of such stature are easily lost.
Having
exhausted my research, and having worn out my fascination, one month ago I
signed over the remains of the Third World Man - his corpse, his tomb, his
world - to the proper authorities: Waste Management®, Ltd., the Omaha, Nebraska
branch. I am not familiar with Nebraska and very much hope never to go there,
but I am given to understand that its Human Development Index has not been
impacted one way or the other by this sudden influx of existential detritus: I
am told that said Index remains very, very low, indeed.
- J.E. Postfrock, 2012
