Art for the Sake of Art Read online

  Beverly furrowed her exoskeleton brows at him and made an annoyed grunt. Normal-Art shrugged. “Sorry, babe, but yer friggin’ boy-toy didn’t tell me I was gonna get the skin on my chest melted off,” he said.

  “Well, why do you think I asked you to take us to a pub?” Tie-Art asked. “You’re not good enough company for me to drink with socially. I wanted you to numb yourself before you got carded. However, you not only chose to order the same type of beverage a twelve-year-old girl would order on my reality, but you then proceeded to give much of it to my jump bug, whose tolerance just happens to be that of a twelve-year-old girl. So don’t blame me if you weren’t numbed enough to handle the pain. Next time, order like a man.”

  “You’re the one drinking Chimay, telling me to order like a man,” remarked Normal-Art with a smirk. “The irony in that is incredible.”

  Tie-Art grinned. “On my version of Earth, I’m not only a twelve-year-old girl, but a fifty-year-old hag, a ninety-year-old clown, and a five-year-old boy.”

  Normal-Art decided to change the subject, because he found it to be absolutely infuriating to argue with himself. “Earlier, you mentioned that you have a proposition for me. What is it?”

  “I want you to accompany me on my quest and act as my bodyguard.”

  Normal-Art slapped the bar and chuckled. “Sorry, chief. Can’t help you there. Don’t know how you expect me to guard your body when I’ve never been in a fight in my entire life. I wouldn’t know where to begin. You’ve definitely got the wrong Art.”

  “I picked you because you are unique among all versions of us.”

  “Is that so?” Normal-Art asked with a smirk. “Mama always told me I’s special.”

  “Out of all of us, you are the only one completely hollow inside, with a total dearth of feelings and emotions. You’re neither good nor bad. On my interdimensional radar, you register as a blank spot.”

  “Well, screw you, pal,” said Normal-Art, shoving a finger into Tie-Art’s chest. “I’m all kinds of filled up inside. I’m a veritable gas station of feelings.”

  “No,” said Tie-Art, “you aren’t. And that is why I need you. I can count on you to watch my back, and when we are on the cusp of accomplishing what we need to accomplish, I can be sure that you will have neither a moral dilemma about the rightness or wrongness of our task, nor will you double cross me.”

  “I’d have to commit to going first, and what makes you think I’m gonna do that?”

  “Because now that I’ve told you that you’re hollow inside, you’re going to try to prove me wrong, though you will undoubtedly fail. You’re going to jump with me, and along the way, you’re going to attempt to show me how you actually do feel emotions. It’ll probably involve a sacrifice of some sort or an emotionally wrought speech about our camaraderie or brotherhood, most likely while we are in the midst of great danger.”

  Normal-Art furrowed his brows. After a few moments of silent thought, he muttered angrily, “When do we leave?”

  “Tomorrow morning,” responded Tie-Art. “Bev’s got to finish charging, and I need to get a little rest. Best use tonight to say goodbye to your lady, at least for a while.”

  Normal-Art shrugged and stood. So did Tie-Art. Beverly, however, popped open the buttons on Tie-Art’s shirt and leapt onto the bar top. The one other patron in the pub gawked at the bug and rubbed his eyes in drunken disbelief. Beverly snatched the bottle of Scotch that the bartender had left on the bar and took a swig. She hopped over to Tie-Art’s stomach, then crawled up to his shoulder and lay cradled there with the bottle. Every few seconds she took a short draught from it and then sighed as she basked in newfound, intoxicated happiness.

  “She’s an odd one, but a good one,” said Tie-Art. “In all the interdimensional traveling I’ve done, I’ve never met another alcoholic Jump Totem.”

  “Jump Totem?”

  “Precisely. Each earth has a different means of interdimensional travel, usually manifested as some type of sacred symbol. My world uses Jump Bugs. Earth 71,987 uses Jump Lizards. Earth 12 utilizes Jump Dogs. The examples are infinite because everybody’s got something different. Earth 55,777, where the Bureau is headquartered, uses Jump Eagles, hence the logo on your I.D. card. Some places use machines, some use food— I know of one earth that uses Jump Gourds— and some earths haven’t even developed interdimensional travel yet. Like yours.”

  “You totally just went over my head,” responded Normal-Art.

  “I’ve a feeling that’s going to happen a lot during this odyssey.”

  * * *

  1 Later, when the hobo attempted to buy a bottle of liquor with the bills, he found that stores on this reality do not accept money from Tie-Art’s home reality, which feature emblazoned across the front of the bill a pale man’s grinning portrait with flaming hair atop his head. Following this rejection, the hobo spent the remainder of his life cursing Tie-Art and what he referred to as “that damn fake-ass money.”2

  2Unfortunately for the hobo, the end occurred a mere four minutes later when he was so distracted staring at the terribly ugly visage on one of the hundred-dollar bills that he stepped in front of a city bus. The bus’s route number was 100, which the hobo might have thought was an interesting coincidence if he were not already flattened by the vehicle.

  Chapter 3

  A Tale of Two Ginnys

  Ginny lay on her stomach and drifted through unconsciousness. She dreamt that she floated above the city, flittering atop skyscrapers and spitting down upon the little ant-sized people below her. She felt herself straying higher and higher into the atmosphere, and when she had soared to the topmost point of the tallest building, she discovered a pink teddy bear. It sat cross-legged atop the spiked point of a radio tower like some surreal, cuddly Buddha. Ginny hovered right up next to it. Its button-eyes bored into her.

  “Don’t let them abduct me,” begged the pink teddy, its mouth a pitch-black cavern opening onto an infinite abyss. “Ginny must rescue me.”

  Ginny felt herself lurch in the air like a marionette doll getting its strings cut. She gasped in surprise, and then stared at the bear with an accusing gaze. It nodded.

  “Time to go now,” it said. “Lots of rescuing to do, so little time.”

  Ginny sensed the last of the strings holding her snap, and she fell. She squeezed her eyelids shut, refusing to look about at the lights from office buildings zooming past her, refusing to look down at the fast-approaching concrete of the city below. The wind whipped through her hair like a tornado-powered hairdryer, and she flapped her arms as though she had transformed into an oversized, ugly pigeon. Then, when her flapping did nothing to avail her fall, she screamed.

  She opened her eyes and found herself back in her home, with its drab curtains and faded off-white walls. She picked up her groggy head from the floor and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. It came away wet, and she sighed. Art constantly teased her because of her drooling, and she was glad he was not here to see the flood that had deluged her face.

  Ginny smelled stale bug spray and remembered what had happened. She recalled discovering her boyfriend at the front door with his identical twin, whom he had never mentioned before. She remembered trying to save them from a giant cockroach, and then being zapped by that same vicious creature. She thought she could recall a clonking in there somewhere, too.

  “Art!” Ginny called. The vibrations of her voice bounced around inside her skull, causing her head to throb. She called his name again, but he did not answer. He must have gone out somewhere with his twin. She cursed.

  Ginny’s blurred vision began to clear, so she looked about the apartment to get her bearings. She balled her fists in anger when she realized that her boyfriend had left her where she had fallen on the floor. He had also walked out the front door and had not even shut it. I could’ve been abducted, or raped, or murdered, she thought. She clenched her fists tighter, wincing as her fingernails dug themselves deep into her palms. Art is so selfish!

&nbs
p; She picked herself up off the floor and stood still for a moment to gain her balance. Her knees wobbled, so she steadied herself on the coffee table. She decided to close the door, so she would not continue paying to air-condition the entire neighborhood. She stepped toward the door— one foot in front of the other, ol’ broad, you can do it— but just after she had grabbed the knob and pushed it mostly closed, a bomb seemed to detonate on her porch and the door exploded in on her.

  The force from the explosion launched her skyward, and she screamed as she flew into the air. She covered her eyes with her hands to prevent little wooden shards of the cheap door from blinding her. She crashed onto her back in the living room, on the middle of her prized, authentic Persian rug, which had been a surprise gift from Art for her birthday. As her head whipped into the ground, she felt damn lucky that the thick rug was there cushioning the thin, hard carpet.

  Pain flashed through her skull like an emergency flare, blindingly strong at first, but receding into a healthy throb after a few seconds. She sat up and touched the spot on the back of her head where it had hit the floor. She felt a knot the size of a mandarin orange. She cursed again.

  Thick, gray smoke billowed through the threshold of Ginny’s door, and she coughed. A squeaky-yet-gravelly voice called out from the cloudy smog in the doorway, though nobody stood within her view. “Ginny Longfellow,” it said. “You have been chosen by the Multiverse.”

  “What the hell’s a Multiverse?” Ginny demanded, barely able to speak over the pain that rattled around in her skull.

  “Every time you make a choice, you undergo a series of events,” called the voice, its gravelly undertones now girded by a raw energy which Ginny could only describe as hints of smug know-it-allness. “These events transpire in a linear format that you refer to as life. However, what you experience as a single timeline is actually but a microscopic thread in the cosmic web of things, because for every fork in the road you have ever encountered, another universe has sprouted off from yours, and in this other universe, you have followed a different path. At this exact moment, there are uncountable versions of different yous running around somewhere out there, creating more yous with each passing second. This reality multiplication has been occurring since the first god on the first reality made the decision to create a universe, resulting in the nigh-infinite incarnation of every possible universe that those of us in the know have dubbed the Multiverse. Is that a satisfactory answer to your question?”

  Ginny blinked.

  “I shall take your silence as awed acceptance. Now stand upon thy feet and come follow me.”

  “Oh, no thanks,” Ginny replied. The voice emanating from her doorway sounded to her a bit like a game show announcer, ordering her to come on down to the stage and play. She hated game shows. “I don’t leave with strangers, no matter whom they represent. Even if it is the Multiverse, or whatever…”

  “Ginny Longfellow, when the Multiverse chooses you, ‘No, thanks’ is not an option,” bellowed the voice. Ginny could sense a hint of spicy anger in the voice, which was fine with her because the voice had, after all, just destroyed her door. She could be sure that that was coming out of her rent.

  Ginny took a few moments to think and weigh her options. Then she sighed. She could see no other alternative than to agree to accompany the voice, for she obviously had little choice in the matter. Whoever or whatever was out there had demolished her door, and it would be safe to assume that it could probably do the same to her body. But she was no rube. If the Multiverse’s schmucky game show host was going force her to run off somewhere, she may as well get something good out of it.

  “Fine,” she replied. “Then what prize do I get if I help?”

  “You get the satisfaction of knowing that out of everyone in every possible reality, the Multiverse has picked you.”

  “Mmmmm, you’ll have to do better than that,” said Ginny.

  “Fine. The Multiverse will throw in a…ummm…a gift certificate. Yeah.”

  “To where?” asked Ginny, her face beaming with joy at her bargaining skills. She realized she had a knack for them when she had traveled on a cruise to Mexico last summer. After disembarking the ship at Cozumel, she had scored shot after shot of tequila upon entering each shop. She walked away with a dozen T-shirts for the price of ten.

  “To anywhere you want,” remarked the voice.

  “To the Gap?”

  “Especially the Gap.”

  “Well, I don’t like the Gap,” responded Ginny, grinning like an idiot.

  The representative of the Multiverse groaned, and then stepped through the doorway. The agent was a blonde woman, three-and-a-half feet tall, with a snaggle-tooth. The tiny woman neglected to wipe her feet on the mat and proceeded to leave a trail of mud cakes behind her as she waddled through the threshold. Her scuffed leather boots caught the light and illuminated her raggedness.

  The pint-sized woman standing in Ginny’s threshold wore tight khaki pants and a light green button-up shirt. She had fastened the buttons in the wrong holes, causing her shirt to sit lopsided on her torso. This miss-assignment of buttons to holes, coupled with her unkempt beehive nest of blonde hair, gave her the look of a mad scientist. Ginny half-expected the dwarf to exclaim Great Scott! in a screechy little voice. Her eyes shone from their sockets like miniature emeralds, and her cheeks stood out rosy red on her face. The tiny blonde wore a yellow kerchief around her neck, with a little knot holding it together that came to a rest on the front of her torso. An olive-green sash stretched across her chest with dozens of odd patches on it. Beneath the sash lay an unbuttoned, equally olive vest. The dwarf mumbled some incoherent phrase and clapped her hands twice. Then she put her hands on her hips and posed like a runway model. Fog flew into the room from all around her. It would have looked majestic if she had not been so tiny and ugly.

  “Then pick anywhere you want,” said the tiny woman, now holding out her left hand to Ginny. “But keep your mouth shut and take my hand. We are going on a journey to the far side of the Multiverse.”

  Ginny began to reach out her hand, but then she stopped. She noticed something in the tiny woman’s face. The little lady was making the exact same expression Ginny did whenever Ginny was feeling mischievous. As a matter of fact, Ginny realized, all the little person’s features were the exact same as hers, only on a smaller scale.

  “What’s your name?” Ginny asked.

  “I was sure this was going to come up sooner or later, but since I’d heard the me of this reality was somewhat of a dullard, I had assumed it would be later. My name’s Ginny.”

  Regular-Sized-Ginny gasped. Apparently witnessing her boyfriend’s exact duplicate playing with a giant roach earlier had not expended all her affinity for shock. Tiny-Ginny grew impatient with waiting for Regular-Ginny to overcome her shock, so she grabbed the taller woman by the wrist. She pulled Regular-Ginny up onto her knees. Regular-Ginny reeled as the world spun around her. When she finally gained her equilibrium again and pushed herself at a snail’s pace up onto her feet, she noticed a squirming beneath the misplaced buttons of Tiny-Ginny’s shirt.

  A dark brown squirrel with two gigantic antennae growing from its forehead poked its head out from between two of Tiny-Ginny’s mismatched buttons. The little creature chittered psychotically and rolled its eyes around in its head. It reminded Regular-Ginny of an insane Muppet. She hated Muppets.

  “His name is Eduardo,” said Tiny-Ginny, “But most just call him Mister E.”

  As Tiny-Ginny was announcing the creature’s name, the squirrel launched a barrage of green lightning that stretched between its flittering antennae. Regular-Ginny noted to herself that this display seemed rather rehearsed, but before she could comment, the green lightning engulfed her. She felt as though she was being sucked into a giant vacuum-cleaner, and then she did not feel anything at all.

  Five minutes later, the two Arts walked into the apartment. It was empty. They smelled no hint of bug spray.

  Chapter 4


  Weapons Make the Men. And the Bug.

  “Where’s Ginny?” asked Normal-Art. “And why do I no longer have a front door?”

  Beverly rubbed her forelegs together, and the friction between the tips of the appendages created a piercing, rapid series of clicks that sounded like a chirping cricket. As Beverly continued rubbing, the noise grew faster and higher pitched, and it soon began to sound like a squeal.

  Art grunted and closed his eyes, trying to ignore the bug. But with his eyes clamped shut and the squealing noise bombarding his ears, Normal-Art could not stop envisioning Jiminy Cricket crooning a pained dirge while being pinned down by some monstrous boy’s fingers and having his legs brutally plucked from his body. Normal-Art opened his eyes, shook the vision from his head, and groaned.

  “Okay, Bev, I understand,” said Tie-Art. “Please calm down and jump us in some tools. Check the storehouse on Earth 5,001.”

  “What’s happening?” Normal-Art asked.

  Tie-Art held up a hand, motioning for Normal-Art to stay quiet. “She needs to concentrate,” he said.

  A thin shaft of blue lightning flickered between Beverly’s antennae, followed by an enormous bolt aimed directly at Normal-Art’s knockoff Persian rug, which he had purchased for Ginny on her birthday and passed off to her as authentic. Normal-Art attempted to protest the zapping of the rug, but instead was silenced by the sudden vacuum created in the room by the flash of blue lightning. His ears popped, and he tried to scream, but he could not find the air to utter a sound. With each passing fraction of a second, the popping in his ears grew louder until it thumped and cracked like a metronome adjusted to a Mach-5 beat.

  The lightning finally subsided, and with it the popping in Normal-Art’s ears. Normal-Art began to feel rather like Baby-Art when he realized that he was now lying on the floor in a fetal position, tears glistening on his cheeks. He did not know how he had managed to get in that position, for he did not remember falling to the ground nor curling himself up. He looked over at Tie-Art. Tie-Art grinned at him, and then winked.