And his conversation was like juggling and swoosh swoosh swoosh olé whoops bang crash and this made him a clown.
And the browncoat was not so very fond of clowns so he abandoned the tsarevich in midsentence and walked back into the streets. But the tsarevich recovered quickly from his consternation and chased after the browncoat and told him he was wrong to drop him for he the tsarevich was Rigoletto and he was Pagliaccio and he was Pierrot and he was Gwynplaine and his was the greatest story of all time.
And the browncoat laughed and told the tsarevich that if this were so the tsarevich must have an hugely well-developed sense of the absurd, and the tsarevich told the browncoat that when he was a boy he would think than when characters died on stage their actors also died in real life, they just had to otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense for him, otherwise it would all have been a lie and lies he hated more than anything else. And so whenever his tutor would take him to the theatre, with half the pit occupied by his armed guards, and he’d be taken backstage after the performance to meet the Hamlets or the Siegmunds or the Penthesileas, he demanded that his guards execute the actors instantly, otherwise the entirety of his universe collapsed and the young tsarevich would writhe on the floor and foam at the mouth and speak in tongues and no one wanted a crippled epileptic on the throne of Russia so they complied and the actors were put to the sword by the reluctant armed guards and the actors they would lie no more.
And the browncoat decided to play the tsarevich’s game and he told the tsarevich that he was constantly terrified of death, and that he was so terrified that he couldn’t do anything, couldn’t get anything done, and he would simply fall into thinking on death and wouldn't even muster enough antithanatic willpower to leave his bed in the morning, if he even woke up in the morning. And he would sit on his bed and clutch his wrists and be scared and anticipate his dying and he sat there and sat and sat and he saw that he didn’t die so he got to work. And the tsarevich told the browncoat that when he is tsar he would shit on the people and it would come from the heart. And the browncoat told the tsarevich that his mother had been a blind woman, blinder than a bat since day one, but that she moved faster than any human he had ever encountered and she was always running at full speed, clicking her walking stick up and down ahead of her faster than the most furious of onanists, and she would attack corners and curves at the most delirious of velocities and she knocked him down once in the kitchen and she was moving so fast that he couldn’t walk for four months while she ran away unscathed and hadn’t even felt him being crushed against her knee but that if one were really lucky one could observe her around their tiny apartment for some hours and map the patterns of her movement and time everything just right and jump towards the ambush spot precisely one second before she was due to pass by and one would, with a bit of luck, land onto her back and latch onto her neck for pointless life – even as a young adult the brownback had very precious convictions – and ride the fastest ride around but even so many weren’t so lucky and would land too soon and be cut in half from the waist down by his speeding mother but for those that succeeded the extra weight would not bother his blind mother at all for at least two to three hours and only then would she come to a violent and unexpected stop and look and touch around her and one had to be careful because if one wasn’t careful one could fly off her and be flattened with inertia against the nearest wall.
And the tsarevich clapped his pink hands with joy at the thought of latching onto browncoat’s speeding mother but the browncoat told him his mother had died or was presumed dead since she uncharacteristically forgot herself on her first crossing of the Blagoveshchenskii Bridge two days after its inauguration and although she had been told its exact length prior to crossing and she was generally quite competent at computing distances and the time it would take her to complete them she still took an early left on the bridge after only the fifth span of the total eight and ran straight into the Neva and appeared to have sunk to the bottom immediately without so much as a bubblestream but many claimed they saw a small trail of underwater waves still going left and deep into the river and that his blind speed demon mother was simply racing on underwater eager to get her groceries and take her new measurements at a favourite tailor for the lovely wedding next month, tailor not seamstress because the browncoat’s mother only wore men’s garments and most people simply attributed this eminently pardonable quirk to her being blind as a winter rose though others threw stones as she pulled the wedding carriage forward.
And the tsarevich became lyrical and wondered where the world would be without mothers and their blind love and the browncoat said that many a smarter man than he or the tsarevich had pronounced mothers and their horripilant maternal functions a bane upon this world and so the world would in troth find itself in a superior state if mothers were not there to erode its tendons and filth its blood. And this was such a risqué pronouncement that the tsarevich begged browncoat to elucidate, and the browncoat told the tsarevich there wasn’t much to clarify it was a simple problem of over-population and over-crowding. And the tsarevich was confused since Russia was a great lordly cuntry with astounding territorial reserves few of which were even modestly well-endowed in terms of population and indeed many of its lands were perfectly devoid of even the minutest human defilement as the browncoat termed it. And browncoat was unswayed by this banal truth but claimed Russia was most blessed in this respect but it fell upon the greatest of leaders to think of lesser states than theirs and to accrete as many gains against the mad peril of over-population on the mappemonde as was achievable in their own blessed kingdom and playground so as to compensate for the many failings in this respect of stupider nations who had no foresight and no guiding philosophical lights. And the browncoat told the tsarevich how all babies are parasites eating women’s souls from the inside and since women had such small perishable souls to begin with the babies would ineluctably render them hard withered husks by the time they were born, and then they perfected in the physical the process of gleeful destruction they had launched in the spiritual. And moreover the lands of Russia were already being cultivated in the optimal manner and the technology could not foreseeably improve for there was nowhere further to push the soil and the gains from adding extra peasants to the soil were negligible at best and so economically irrelevant, and the more mouths one added the more one had to divide the precious gifts of the earth, and the more peasants there were the greater the chances some would starve and all would go hungrier because of the greater need for food and resources and therefore the greater the chances of the hungry peasants being catapulted into ferocious jacqueries and the greater the odds of some of the hungry peasants learning to read and reading books that explained to them not only why they were not getting enough to eat but also why they were not getting enough to own and call their own and why monarchy is theft and their negligible peasant minds would be unable to process such convoluted reasoning and they would skip to the end and the end said kill the boyars and blow up the tsar and this would lead not only to the death of the nobility and the monarchy but also less importantly to the death of Russia as the browncoat and the tsarevich knew it for a Russia without aristocrats and without a strong silent fist clutching the reins would be a new creature and scared of the light and covered in amniotic nonsense and such a creature would know nothing of the world and interpret every movement outside and inside itself as hostile and respond in kind once it grew its own young claws and it would hurl itself at the world and scratch in fury and tear open its own stomach to claw at the enemy within and the hunger within like Erysichthon and surely the tsarevich understood the browncoat’s thinking the browncoat thought so he would not distress the tsarevich any longer with his apocalyptic follies.
And the tsarevich was so engrossed in the brownback’s argument that he kept nodding for minutes after the brownback had finished and then opened his mouth three times but had nothing to say and simply gasped for air like a trophy fish whose head is about to be smashed with an h
ammer, and then he rushed off to the royal palace screaming for his armed guards. And the browncoat was amazed by how the world’s fallacies seemed compatible and fully consistent with each other and how they cohabited in an admirable and fully enviable harmony, a splendid system of friendly falsehoods and interlocking idiocies like the splinters of a Trojan horse.
And he walked back downtown and he stopped suddenly on the street for he saw her. And grace was in all her steps, heav'n in her eye and so cruel was she. And her stony face was still beautiful and her stony face shielded them both against the blades of wind and the blades of wind did not shield either of them from her stony face. And he had not seen her since the kiss no that was not it he hadn’t seen her since she had jumped from the window maybe hoping to ride the old man’s laughter like a magic carpet into the sun and dissipate herself and her being into the sun. And right after the kiss that kiss she had told him how she and the old man had met. The old man had approached her in the summer garden one day and told her that he wanted ‘to write my name in come all over [her] face’ and she said nothing but took his hand and took him home and adopted him and he came on her face and in her mouth, knelt studiously besides her, made her stick out her tongue so as to render the come that he had there deposited easily accessible and proceeded to fingerpaint in come on her forehead, which he had left purposefully unpolluted. His final draft spelt out the words 'my name'. And she was what the brownback saw on the street now no mistaking her and she saw him too and was alive and she walked toward him.
And the brownback held out his open palm toward her and she stopped and then he stopped looking at her and walked away and she stayed behind.
And downtown the brownback saw that the city thought and moved at a rate and complexity no human could ever match for there were buildings under demolition and buildings under renovation and buildings under construction and interrupted constructions under demolition and interrupted demolitions being reconstructed and all the noises and dust storms played amongst themselves like bored tiger cubs. And for some reason browncoat walked straight to the most ungainly and least ferocious and most monochromatic building he could see and the building was new but completed and seemed fully functional for there was an huge line of people waiting to go in.
And no one in the crowd knew what they were queuing for and they had joined the line many hours before and even then the line had been enormous and they all went by the principle that if so many people were queuing it must be something worthwhile and all the many people simultaneously choosing to go inside the same building could not be wrong since they were so many. And the browncoat pretended to need to use the bathroom urgently and threatened to let loose in the middle of the crowd and the guards let him in but asked him to hurry the fuck up and use the handicapped bathroom since it was generally less likely to be occupied.
And the brownback walked in the only hallway and the hallway eventually split in two and the two new hallways were very short and led to two rooms labelled men and women respectively. The brownback went into the room labelled men and saw that it consisted of an huge open space and there were hundreds of hospital beds and lounge chairs and hundreds of men being talked to and operated on by hundreds of doctors and hundreds of nurses. And all the doctors told all the men that there were essentially three options and they were all perfectly safe and that none of them hurt not at all not the tiniest bit and these were removal of the testicles or permanent erectile inhibition via injection – this would also leave the men bald and most likely toothless – or removal of the testicles and the penis if only to etch the men legibly onto the safe side. And the men nodded and weighed the three options and discarded the second immediately for they were very attached to their hair and most went for the third. And the doctors would inform the men that because of the risible lack of funding and suitable conditions and equipment the doctors would be performing the operations right there on the lounge chairs and there were no anæsthetics so could the men please grit their teeth – which they were very wise to keep by the way so excellent choice – and not bother the doctors excessively during the operation as this only made them irascible and vindictive and the men knew how doctors can be petty didn’t they so it was best to leave their complaints until after and oh if they wanted anything at any time including during the operation like a drink of water or a last swing at one of the buxom nurses they should just get up from the beds or lounge chairs and tuck their innards back in if need be and do what they needed to do and get back in reasonable time no worries whatever. And the men nodded so the doctors said they would spare the men their blathering and they pulled out their switchblades and steak knives and letter openers and carved the men up and started work. And some of the doctors were quite old and naturally made mistakes, most of them quite anodyne and rectifiable, such as opening up the men’s chests or performing prophylactic lobotomies or giving the men complimentary circumcisions.
And the brownback walked to the nearest man who appeared to have passed out from pain in his navy blue lounge chair and his doctor was so absorbed in his work he did not notice the brownback at all and the brownback asked the nurse, who was doing nothing at the time anyway, if she could waken the patient for the brownback had some nagging questions. And the bored nurse nodded and she poked the fainted man repeatedly in the shoulder with her sharp nail and this triggered a reflex kick of the man’s left foot and the kick made full contact with the doctor and the doctor lost his balance and fell over and tried to arrest his fall by stabbing his razorblade into the man’s leg and and sliding down along the man’s leg with the razorblade and holding on and the deep slash must have deranged a nerve center in the man’s leg for he screamed out and opened his eyes and was fully conscious. And browncoat seized this advantage and asked the man who had forced or coerced him to undergo this operation and the man said no one it was absolutely voluntary and browncoat asked him why do it then and the man said it was free and browncoat asked him whether he had considered the numerous ramifications of such a procedure and the man said no not really but his wife was a prude and he was bored of vag anyway and he wouldn’t miss it at all eh what.
And the brownback thanked him for his answers and exited the men’s operation room and entered the room labelled women.
And in this other room, which was as large and densely populated as the previous one if not more so, there were also many many lounge chairs and doctors and nurses. And the women in the lounge chairs did not receive a verbose briefing or a trinity of options but were told to lie down and spread their legs and the doctors did not make any fuss over their simple repetitive but to them eminently necessary work and they sewed and stitched the women’s cunts fully shut. And there were other non-medical men in the room holding women’s hands during the operation, presumably husbands boyfriends lovers or fathers. And the women’s operations were significantly faster than the surgery on men in the other room, and the supportive men helped the women up and gave them a solid shoulder and helped them walk out of the operation amphitheatre and back outside. And some men would, for unknown and incomprehensible reasons, grow very excited and take their women then and there on the lounge chairs or in the small hallway and they the men would breathe relieved although they could rarely hear themselves breathe or think through the women’s screams and the men would walk out and immediately put the women back in the growing queue outside and this was not as tedious as it sounds since women were processed much much faster than men so they and their accompaniments were out in less than three hours generally although there were some deviations.
And the brownback had seen all he had wanted to see and did not fail to marvel at what fat black echoes lurked in the cavities of his fat black O’s and D’s and Q’s, and as he was about to walk out of the building he ran into a small man wearing a long blue coat. And the small man looked at the browncoat and inspected him thoroughly but quickly and was rather surprised by the results and then looked up to browncoat’s face and flashed a long, pain
ful automatic smile and asked browncoat how he was and if there was anything he the small man could help him with. And the browncoat was put off by the infectious, acquisitive emptiness in the small man and in the small man’s words and told the small man he was leaving. And the small man extended an arm sideways to prevent this and still smiling told the browncoat that it was impossible not to notice, and now that he the small man had noticed it impossible to un-notice, how the browncoat was in a building holding a specific designated purpose and yet he appeared to be walking out of it without having achieved and embraced that purpose. And the browncoat looked at the small man and cut his eyes on the steeled sharpness of the small man’s smile and told the small man that he had come here with his wife and had been with her in the women’s room but unfortunately she had not survived the operation and so he was going to their his and his wife’s home to grieve. And he believed he would not be a suitable subject for the doctors in the men’s room anyway since he would grieve and cry uninterruptedly and this surely would greatly aggravate the doctors and only render his own operation more uselessly complex. And the small man’s steel was knocked out of his smile by the diamondblade of the browncoat’s logic and he extended the same hand, tame and friendly now, and gifted the browncoat with his honestest condolences and it was tragic and they were stomping on the incidence of female death but unfortunately the evil had not been wholly eradicated and he hoped the brownback would understand in time that it had all been for a supremely necessary cause and reason. And the browncoat waved the unspoken blame away by saying no no he understood fully it was just that the human mental infrastructure was less gifted at processing such events than the statist hivemind regardless of their moral and logical necessity but regardless he hoped to make a full recovery as soon as his wife was cremated.
And the small man offered the browncoat a consoling tour of the facilities and how could the browncoat say no and he took him around to see every nook and cranny and explained all the procedures and the subtle differences between the hygienic requirements for operating on men and women and then he took the brownback to a series of offices behind the men’s room and there he introduced a small woman typing away as his wife and the small woman waved at the browncoat and returned to the typing for it seemed very lively and important. And the small man said he was chief doctor here and much of the intellectual framework for the centre and its operations were his no need to clap so forcefully he told his wife and now his life story he had also been the centre’s first male patient and he proudly displayed his full mop of hair and the absolute flatness of his crotch.
And brownback asked the small man what had attracted him to this business initially and the small man said this was his life’s passion and previously he and his wife had run a fertility clinic but then he was confused and inverted everything and only after a numinous chat with a superior man did he understand how wrong and counterproductive his life’s activity had been and under the seal of royal approval he had converted his fertility clinic into this centre and he was extremely dedicated to its work and that he also had a side business in contraceptives and granted his two operations rather cannibalised each other but regardless he was so dedicated to the entire range of options available to prevent human reproduction that if he could he would even issue a bull on immaculate birth control if he could that was hehe but that was just a silly man daydreaming and no need to pay attention.
And the small man also told the browncoat that in addition to his wife’s very giving involvement with his project his daughter worked as a nurse in the men’s room she was a vampyric little nympho but she was her father’s little nympho and his own mother at the advanced age of 88 worked as a doctor in the men’s room also for his mother too was an inexcusable slut la-la-loved the cock that nigh-nonagenarian cur but how could the small man not love her passion for his passion (for the excising of the objects of her passion). And the brownback saw that the small man was highly enthusiastic about his ideas and his work and he asked the small man whether he wasn’t maybe a deluded victim of his own destructive energy and propaganda and the small man said that this was very droll to him and he was an highly rational fellow and, as his wifemotherdaughter will surely tell the browncoat, there is nothing he has lessmore talent for than being a prisonervictimtyrantprophetapostleapostate.
And the browncoat said he saw that this was the highest truth and he was very grateful for the tour and the lecture but now he had to go mourn his wife in privacy and gratitude and reverent salutations to the small man’s mother. And the small man said he would escort him out and they said goodbye to the small man’s wife who ignored all around her and was only attuned to the discrepancies in her husband’s manic voice and only reacted when she sensed that he was riding another paranoid burst of exomologesis and even then she only watched to ensure he did not attempt to prove his guilt and authenticity of faith by extracting from within another of his cavitary organs of value moderate to bio-high. And the small man and the browncoat walked to the main hallway and the small man stopped the browncoat and asked him whether he was really who he said he was a mournful widower and whether he hadn’t actually been sent by his employers to supervise the operations and evaluate his work and his voice was trembling and his eyes were confused also. And the browncoat said enigmatically that regardless of all this mud he thought the small man was discharging his function very and very well and he winked at the small man and the small man was very relieved and emotional about being very relieved and the small man shook brownback’s hand and thanked him and spoke so fast he was spitting in brownback’s face and brownback finally said it was time for him to go for he also had duties and functions to carry out and the small man winked in solidarity and returned the brownback’s hand in almost the same state he had found it in and said goodbye and brownback walked out of the building.
And he walked away from the building, and other men and women who had been inside the building walked with him, and they all had bizarre approaches to walking and the men spread their legs as far as they could, in both length and width, and the women walked on the tips of their toes almost without separating their legs at all overweight ballerinas, and the browncoat paraded his normal walking before them and raced past the men and the women and into the uninterested lights of downtown Peterburg.