Triple-J and Chaz flick and look at their cures.
The painsinging, which hasn’t abated since the previous flick, gets louder for an instant, and then, just as suddenly, radically quieter.
“Oh no,” Chaz says, eyes still on his cure.
The camera zooms in on the cure; it’s still; it’s dacted; its neck appears broken.
“Alright, stop,” Burroughs says.
Chaz and Triple-J cease looking at their cures.
“Well this is unprecedented,” Chaz says.
“What is?” Triple-J says, checking out Chaz’s cure.
“Seems I’ve dacted my cure, bygolly,” says Chaz. “But I didn’t overload. The flick is what dacted it. I flicked it too hard.”
“You lose,” says Bryce.
“True dat,” says Lyle. “You did not win.”
“Well I can’t rightly say I’ve won, of course, but were I to say that I felt I’ve lost…” Chaz says. “I mean, were I to say that, chaps, why, I’d be a lying Liam. An effing fibbing Frankie.”
“And yet you’re the loser,” Chaz Jr. says. “And so your feelings have betrayed you. I daresay they’re worthless.”
“Easy,” Triple-J says. “What’s your ruling, Burroughs?”
“I don’t know,” says Burroughs. “Technical gazebreak?”
“But I didn’t break my gaze,” Chaz says.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Chaz Jr. says, “but I believe the designation ‘technical’ covers that, what what.”
“No,” Lyle says. “Chaz has a point. I do like ‘technical,’ but this was more a technical cure overload, I think. Chaz didn’t look away.”
“Nor did I overload!”
“But the outcome’s much the same,” Lyle says. “There in your hand lies a dacted cure, what, a dacted cure dacted because you dacted it. And certainly there was some loss of control. You didn’t, after all, intend to dact it. You said so yourself, what what hey hey.”
“Does it matter what we call it?” Triple-J asks them.
“I suppose that it doesn’t. Not much,” Chaz says.
“Word up,” says Lyle.
“Hear hear,” says Bryce.
“Agreed,” says Chaz Jr. “You’re quite the loser either way, holmes.”
Cold Open
from Inhuman Self Denial
2006, Paramount Pictures, USA
[3 minutes]
In profile, Basho—a long-tailed, two-legged, violet-eyed Curio with shimmering white, almost silvery, velvet, and a set to its brow that seems, in equal parts, to invite and refuse interpretation—does yoga atop a ten-foot-high pillar of petrified redwood: resting tortoise to embryo in womb. An arm’s length away, a monk in a loincloth, barely out of his teens, sits in lotus on a matching pillar, eyes locked on Basho’s.
Neither monk nor cure appears aware they’re being filmed.
The frame gradually widens til we see their pillars are inside the hollow of a giant sequoia.
As Basho transitions from embryo in womb to upward cock, the monk jerks forward, then straightens again, and a voiceover—male, Oxbridge—states: “At the age of one hundred twenty-nine months, Basho is the oldest known Curio on record. Since 2003—for nearly three years now—tourists and seekers from around the world have made the pilgrimage to northern California’s San Marcona Monastery to behold Basho and its master, known by the brothers of San Marcona as ‘The One Who Sees Basho,’ at their morning exercises.”
The frame widens further. A dozen monks in orange robes kneel shoulder to shoulder in the sequoia’s shadow, facing a crowd of roughly two hundred pilgrims, all of whom are gazing at the figures on the pillars, many awwing and sighing and reflexively patting at their chests and their pockets, presumably for cameras that were confiscated earlier; confiscated, perhaps, at the gate to the stone-walled courtyard in which, we now see—as the outward zooming comes to a halt—the entire scene is set.
The voiceover continues: “But for The One, and a pair of blind servants, no one is permitted within fifteen feet of Basho. This prohibition, as you’re about to witness is…well warranted.”
For a moment, Basho, still in upward cock, appears, from our relatively distant perspective, to levitate a little, though soon it comes clear that it’s using its tail to raise the rest of its body. The self-patting and awwing and sighing crescendo. Sobs are heard. Laughter. Couples are embracing.
And then: a disturbance near the back of the courtyard. A man cries out, rushes violently forward, shoving aside those who fail to make way for him. At the front of the crowd, blocking his path, sits a child in a wheelchair. The man attempts to vault the child, but catches a knee on the back of her head and lands on a shoulder just in front of the monks, who have leapt to their feet.
Three monks step forward. The man stands up and attempts to get past them. He is clapped on one ear, and he drops just as suddenly. The monk who clapped him lifts him under the arms, a second parts the crowd, and the clapped man is dragged toward the back of the courtyard.
While the third monk tends to the girl in the wheelchair, three more people—two boys and a lone man—push toward the front along the side of the crowd, and, in doing so, incite a number of the pushed to push forward themselves.
The nine otherwise-untasked monks form a pair of concentric semicircles in front of the sequoia: six make the outer circle, nearer the crowd; three make the inner one, nearer the tree. Someone shouts, “Now!” and those in the crowd who fail to move forward are trampled.
As the outer semicircle of monks fends off the onrushers, we momentarily glimpse the pair of blind servants entering the hollow through the back of the tree.
Close-up of Basho and The One on their pillars, continuing to exercise. The upper halves of the servants, who have somehow climbed the backs of the pillars, appear. One servant fits a gas mask onto The One. The other servant dangles a much smaller gas mask in front of Basho, which lowers itself, untangles its limbs, dons the gas mask, and bends and twists into sleeping tortoise.
As the frame widens again, and we see the onrushers, having grown in number, overcoming the outer semicircle of monks, and the inner semicircle extending batons from the sleeves of their robes and shouting toward the tree, and as Basho transitions to rising tortoise, and as The One sits lotus, what appear at first to be four or five pinecones thud down from on high, into the melee. These “pinecones” start hissing, and those near them start coughing and falling down, and a dozen gas-masked, dark-robed monks bearing tasers and batons drop from branches, encircle their brothers, and whatever happens next is rendered invisible behind the rising cloud of milky red and blue smoke.