“I do, you good-looking thing. And, hey, I’m really talking to all of you. You all look good to me. But, shit, you lady, you’re, I don’t even know where to begin.”
“Begin with why all this stuff was here,” Grace said.
“All right, doll. You see, I think the robots were finishing up this baby. Making this fish… Don’t look that way. Let me explain, let me go into what we in the mathematics business like to call one big ole fucking goddamn shit- eating hypothesis.
“This world is hand and machine made, gents and two ladies. I shit thee not and fuck with you not at all. That’s what I believe. You see, this fish, it was water workable, and the robots, they were here to finish up its insides. Do maintenance while it was operating, and at the same time being built. Maybe whoever was building this fish, having it made, forgot all about it and set it adrift before the robots were all done. They had a built-in wear-out time. Like those dissolving stitches you get in your head. They stay in so long, then they dissolve. That’s what happened with the robots. They were supposed to do maintenance for so long, then the fish was supposed to go obsolete, like a Ford, you know.
“Why, I don’t know. Maybe there’s no real reason. Maybe it’s just that these work-on-stuff robots can only last so long before they go nutty-bolty. That being the case, they-whoever they is-decided they’d build them with this go-tobutter clause in their wiring. Finish up a certain span of work, then goo-out.
“Ain’t that a possible?
“Sure it is. Don’t think on it long. Sure it is.
“So they got the grid to not get eat up by the stomach acid they made. And they have lights above, ‘cause they’re doing work inside a way-down-in-thedark structure, so therefore gentlemen and two ladies, you got to have some old-fashioned illumination, lest you think you’re sharpening your pencil and it’s someone’s dick.
“They didn’t even take note of us when we came, those robots. Not so much as a howdy-do, or, oh-shit, you done found out the fish is electric and we ain’t the Partridge Family. They were programmed, hot-wired and motivated, chip-headed and blueprint driven.”
“But, the fish has flesh,” Reba said.
“Oh, yeah. It’s got flesh and it’s got veins that pulse with blood. But, I’ll tell you another thing this big old finny motherfucker has got, and that’s wires, sweet baby cakes.
“I know you must have noted now and again that the dinosaurs seemed to crackle and pop, spark and sputter. Yet, they died or got killed, we ate them and didn’t find wires in our teeth, so, it was like what can only be called one big fucking mystery.
“My belief, and you can just quote the living dogshit out of me on this, is that the wires were too small. No shit. Too small even in dinosaurs. To understand the wires, how this alien-built world works (I know, I said aliens, and I’ll stand by that remark), is you got to understand the wires are minuscule, as in small little bastards. You can’t see them with the undressed eyeball, and, before you go where I know you’re gonna go, let me run ahead of you.
“You’re gonna say: Yeah, but Bjoe, we done ate the meat off these critters, and we didn’t eat the wires, and what I’m going to tell you, now grab hold of your balls-I already got mine, and those of you who are ball-less may clutch anything at will-I’m gonna tell you flat out, you did eat them too, my little hungry folks.
“They’re edible. They dissolve. I mean, shit, they can make women’s panties you can eat right off the snatch and have them taste like fruits and such, so you think some way-advanced alien motherfuckers can’t make some edible iddy-bitty goddamn wires?
“They can.
“And inside this fish, in which you could stuff several dinosaurs and our worn-out asses, except you baby blonde, goddamn you are fine and movie-star-like and not even partially worn out-”
“Tell it,” Grace said. “Just go on and tell it.”
“Yeah. Okay. Look at the wall of the cave. See the flesh of the fish pulsing. See those cables of veins. Well, when we cut this dude apart, just dug chunks out of it on the inside, touched bones in some cases (the scaffolding is what I call the skeleton), I found wrapped around them, running through the meat, veins, I could see were wires. Red and blue, green and white. You can cut through them and not get shocked. Remember what I said about physics here being bylaws. Things are different. Bring that little thought back to the fore.
“And now I’m gonna go all Serbian guy Nikola Tesla on you, and we’re gonna talk alternating-current power transmission, rotating magnetic field principle, and polyphase alternating-current system and induction motor all over the goddamn place, and let me quote B.A. Behrend, ‘Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, let Tesla be, and all was light.’
“That’s from my schooling, gents and two ladies. In math and physics and such, I was just schooled all over the goddamn place, although I regret to say I’m all theory and no action, or not much action anyway. I once fell off a chair screwing in a light bulb. That’s my electrical work career right there, in the proverbial motherfucking nutshell.
“Now, you’re looking at me funny, like I’ve gone north and am waving at you from afar, shouting out stuff the wind is carrying away. Let me put this where you can fucking understand it. Get your mind jaws around this, gentlemen and two ladies.
“This electricity comes up from the ground, the water, out of the atmosphere, drawn in by… Well, shit, I don’t know. Do I look like a fucking Einstein? I just quote people, I don’t really understand them. Except to say, There ain’t no plug-ins, Jack, there’s just the electricity, and it’s on its own, pulsing through the wires, the veins, the edible cables. And the fish, it lives off the electricity, just like we humans live off electricity. At birth, BAM, there’s a spark, jumpercable time, my little dirties. Our batteries are charged. We got that crackly stuff running through our veins. Call it chi if you will, and if you want to go Japanese, call it ki, and, if like me, you want to stay on the planet Earth (though we ain’t, I don’t think), call it elec-goddamn-tricity.
“Call it string cheese for all I care.
“You see, the robots, they were finishing up this little fucker, and whoever owned it set it a’sail and a’dive before it was done, and the robots, they were trapped here, and they just kept working while we were here. Not bothering us at all, but restoring lights and fixing stuff, shining the grid.
“So, like I said-and we’ve come back to it gentlemen and two ladies. Finally, those robot gentlemen just wore down and dissolved. Went to silver-metal goo, they did, and that goo just went right through the grid and into the goop, and sayonara robot fellas. No shit, pilgrims. That’s how it went down.
“Their work was done, their time was done.
“But I done told you all that. I tell you now, we got a new phase me and my pals are latching into.
“We used the robots’ ladders to climb up here, and there was no place to really rest, so we ventured to cut into the walls of the fish, just so deep, so we could make caves.
“And caves we made, and that’s when I found in the walls the veins, so big ’cause the fish is so big. All just one big train-and-fish set this motherfucking world is. Here we are, adrift out there in the hooty-hooty with nothing but our own goddamn selves, and maybe now and again a peek at what this real world offers: aliens seen in dreams-yeah, I see your face, you got them dreams-and wires seen in fish-meat caves.
“I might also add, that the meat we cut out to make the caves, oh, my goodness, it was sweet as pussy fresh with the pubescent bloom, salted down with excitement sweat and the juices that cause it to make smacking sounds in the deeps of the nights.
“But that was one of the few good things, that meat. ‘Cause, down here, it wasn’t grand. The water the fish gulped was drinkable, if not exactly Evian, and the food the fish swallowed kept us with bellies full. And we, of course, could borrow from the fish itself from time to time. And we had the light, and because we did, well, we couldn’t sleep good at night.
“So, early on, we lived at the farther end of the fish, not down in the dark part of the tail, but farther than here. This was before the caves, I should say. You see, there were the cars and such down there, stuff the fish had scooped up somehow. We would go down there and sleep in the wrecked cars to get away from the light. But the lights started to die out down there, and that’s when we began to appreciate them. Unlike stars that wink out, their light did not travel long and far while dead or dying. Just being lights, they winked the fuck out and left that part of the fish as dark as the inside of a wolf’s ass.
“This darkness, it produced another problem.
“I mean, it was there before. Way down in the tail where there were never lights and it stayed dark. Way down there bad things moved, my little dirties. We didn’t know what they were, though some folk went that way to
