Author’s note: This installment in the ongoing saga of the Brothers Squimbop begins directly after the ending of “The Brothers Squimbop in Kansas,” published in the previous issue (Winter, vol. 106.4). The Brothers have now refreshed their origin story through a protracted mime routine in western Kansas, and set off into the Dust Bowl to seed the legend they hope to one day be famous for. Events take a turn for the strange when they pass through a fantastical curtain set up by an enterprising farmer, and the Brothers find themselves jockeying for position with thousands of other Squimbop duos along the yellow brick road, which, in this version of events, leads straight to Dodge City.
From here, the action ties together several of my ongoing fictional locations and scenarios, primarily “Dodge City,” an absurdist version of the actual frontier town and site of my Room in Dodge City trilogy (2017–2023), and the saga of “Professor Squimbop,” one-half of the Brothers Squimbop duo and antagonist of my 2019 novel Angel House, which begins just where the action here leaves off. In this sense, the following story fills in both temporal and spatial lacunae on the map that I’ve been developing for many years.
Like so many duos before them, the Brothers Squimbop emerged on the other side of the farm curtain with the Kansas they’d embarked into behind them and nothing but Dodge City up ahead. The curtain rippled shut on the endless wheat expanse of Ransom County so that here, on the bloody, bloody Road to Dodge City, as the mummers and drum corps chanted, they were in the thick of something at once contiguous with and entirely discrete from all they’d been brought up to consider their place of origin, to say nothing of the heroic future they had also, until a moment ago, believed to be their birthright.
With no time to reflect on what this transition might signify, they committed to marching along the road, straight as a parade route toward an altar already decked out and waiting to celebrate a sacred event. Their feet fought for purchase on the yellow bricks among the feet of thousands of others, some faster than they were and some slower, while some bled out in the crush, turning the parade route into a Red Sea that showed no sign of parting.
Through all this they marched on, their determination growing as the density of slick material underfoot also grew and their eyes fixated on the distant but increasingly vivid silhouette of The Dodge City Skyline up ahead, strung from one corner of the horizon clear across to the other. Each Brother—still Jim and Joe, they all took pains to remember, though none dared to assign himself either name at the other’s expense—kept his eyes on that skyline, determined not to waver and even more so not to fall under the million feet churning behind him, a churn whose relentless pace dragged the horizon closer one grueling step at a time, as if Dodge City were a massive float on wheels, rolling their way as their feet pushed a crank buried just beneath the bloody bricks.
As the ramshackle network that strung their minds together began to seize and then insist upon this understanding of the present episode, each Brother kept his eyes on the skyline to such a degree that he lost track of the Brother beside him, terrified to look away even for the instant it would’ve taken to verify that he was still marching as half of an iconic duo bearing the inviolable particulars of a shared life story ready for The Dodge City Biopic Treatment, rather than as one node in a million-headed Brother pack, a lone speck of fuzzy Kansan memory in a tumbleweed procession that was now, once again, composed of nothing but strangers. Each began to fear he was lost in the lumpen horde, frothing with anticipation at the chance to dominate, to have his story alone committed to the celluloid he could already hear hissing beneath the crunch of Squimbop skulls underfoot, regular and comforting as the popping of popcorn in Tommy Bruno’s machine.
This sound spurred them all to yet greater speeds as the road grew dense with Outskirts, the open desert of their early approach thickening into one- and two-story buildings and, soon after that, filling in with booths staffed by former or pseudo-Squimbops in fright wigs and novelty mustaches that hung crooked as their glue melted in the heat of the growing frenzy.
“The Brothers Squimbop in Kansas!” shouted a monger draped in the black dress of the woman who’d borne them so many times over. He leaned across the lip of a makeshift puppet booth and held out a cluster of marionettes. “Collect ’em all! The mime, the other mime, the black-clad woman, and . . .” he shook the cluster hard enough that a few heads and feet fell off, vanishing into the churn, “. . . the Brothers themselves! Jim and Joe, so tragically lost in their haste to reach Dodge City that they’ll never find each other again, and even if they did, they’d never know it was their Brother they’d found! It’s every man for himself now, with no mother to say which is which and which the other!!”
He pulled out a model of the farm curtain they’d passed through to end up here, and stuck his finger in and out with a ghoulish grin, increasing the speed until he mimicked an explosion and smashed the model with his other fist, feigning shock on impact.
The procession cackled, all the Squimbops as one, even as they swooned beneath the terror that what this puppet salesman had said was true. “All of us”—or all of them, they couldn’t help thinking—“could be Jim or Joe now, any two heads could form a set, any two out of these thousands could be the Real Brothers Squimbop, and we’d never know it. And what’s worse, the real ones would never know it either . . . their being real would amount to no more than a piece of trivia recited by schoolchildren on a tour of the Media Center in Cooperstown, NY, in exchange for a pat on the head and a token for a gift shop Squimbop Suit while the school buses idled in the lot at the end of the day.” They heard themselves chanting this lament, their mouths fixed around the words like the mouths of carriage horses around their salty bits.
“The Brothers Squimbop on the Road to Dodge City!” shouted another puppet salesman. “Relive a simpler time . . . relive the long, long approach, before all that happened in Dodge City had to happen. Before the vectors of authority grew so muddled that all narratives fell off the cliff of wishful thinking and sank into the swamp of . . .” He dragged his puppets along a model of the road laid out on the booth’s counter, smashing some under the feet of the others, laughing and squishing the rest together, until most were ruined. He regarded what was left with a look of real confusion, as if he’d expected this remnant to resolve the entire conundrum, while the mummers sang, “Now even the puppet sellers look confused / Bad moon a-rising, good times on the wane / True Story of the Brothers S . . . / Enough to drive a sober man insane.”
All the Squimbops sang along, too caught up in the tune to wonder how they knew the words.
The sales pitches and the songs about them continued to one-up each other, while members of the procession took over for those salesmen who’d been slain in the line of duty and The Dodge City Outskirts grew denser and denser, until they were hardly Outskirts at all. When the prospect of arrival drew near, a run on the remaining puppets occurred. Soon all the booths had been ransacked and the passion play of The Brothers Squimbop on the Road to Dodge City, told through an infinitude of marionette mouths all mashed together, coincided with the survivors’ emergence in the town proper so synchronously that later accounts, buried deep in the biopic that played on loop in one of the Media Center’s three main auditoriums, would claim the puppet reenactment had served as a lucky charm, permitting the survival of those relatively few Squimbops that did survive . . . without whom, so the story went, all of what’s known about the Brothers would have been lost to the same swamp from which the culminating forces of the present episode will be dredged in due time and, in contravention of a dozen international treaties, deployed on the field of battle.
Those who’d made it this far kicked over the last of the puppet booths that clustered even more densely inside the town, drank and ate from donkey carts selling roast goat and malt liquor, and shoved inward, shoulder to shoulder, mouths chattering around whatever they’d managed to put in them, desperate to go on telling their story lest, in the chaos, they forgot it and reverted to remembering only what they could hear themselves sing, unable to break rhythm with the mummers.
But their heads were so close together, each Brother’s mouth pressed wetly against another’s ear, that even though they’d made it to the center of Dodge City, where the True Story would finally be put into production according to the framework they’d agreed to acknowledge on the parade route, no such story emerged. “Ship” emerged, as did “Black Forest,” “mime and uncle show,” “Alaska,” “Olathe,” and “farm curtain,” but nothing resembling a sentence, let alone a large enough sentence cluster to cohere into a tale, which might develop into the script for the canonical biopic whose sale they’d ostensibly risked their lives to come here to broker.
Instead, a pregnant pause ensued, a collective exhalation that could only last so long. There was only so much breath they could expel, and only so much spittle they could wipe from their ears, before it was time to ask in earnest why they’d come to this town, if not to see the True Story unfold, complete and clarified as never before.
The square took on a powder keg atmosphere as the peace they’d fought so hard to achieve began to fester. They returned to fighting over puppets, turning the square into a facsimile of the road they’d marched down to arrive in it, even if now this required marching in circles. “We haven’t arrived yet!” they began to chant, as they hastily erected puppet booths from scraps of smashed wood and shredded velvet, while others began to jockey for position, determined to reinvoke the afternoon’s now-sacred parade, when the Promised Land was still up ahead, shimmering on the horizon, and not yet underfoot, slick with goat grease and spilled liquor. When all that mattered was making it to Dodge City, knowing full well that most among them would not.
“Onward, onward, noble soldiers, into The Real Dodge City at last,” chanted the Brothers, attempting to pick up where the mummers—who, believing their work was done, had dispersed—left off. For a long, dire moment, there were no iconic songs about this second procession, which would at last achieve in reality what the first had merely glimpsed in a fever. Then there were.
Singing these new songs, they marched in the widest circles that the square would permit, pressing up against the storefronts and cafes, doing all they could to convince themselves that Dodge City still lay up ahead, on the far side of a bloody conflict that would determine nothing less than whether any of those gathered tonight had the right to live safely and peaceably in a clarified future, as upstanding citizens of a sane community, veterans of the War to End All Wars, or whether they’d be vaporized or banished to roam as nameless outlaws, alternating between calling themselves Jim and Joe, riding a trail of ever-diminishing returns as they ducked into one roadhouse and small-town Elks Lodge bar after another, placing their hats on the scuffed brown wood and hoping an old tale of The Dodge City Civil War would earn them a domestic lager or shot of watery Jack, even as the old bartenders grew older and older and then, as had to happen one day, began to grow alarmingly young.
The Dodge City Civil War. None could say where the notion had come from, other than to picture a cue card thrown onstage from an unseen audience eager to push a flailing act into its next phase, but now that it had arrived, there was no masking its import. The square was so narrow, and its energies so jagged, that—this much was beyond clear—something had to occur to make their arrival stick. To bring the bloody, bloody Road to Dodge City to a viable climax, beyond which whoever survived could settle into a sort of afterlife, a Postwar Era of peace and prosperity where any remaining simmer would be shunted safely into cinema and Dodge City would mean the end of the wilderness rather than its impassible continuation.
An endless spool of Dodge City Civil War cinema, they all thought. To age gracefully into a war movie senescence, first must come the War. As soon as this notion arose, it began to spread. The remaining Squimbops traced the square’s perimeter over and over, letting the prospect of War work its way through them, until they stood together before a plaque that read Sacrifice Square: Site of the First Battle of The Dodge City Civil War.
If they’d been ready to risk their lives a moment ago, suddenly some of them weren’t any longer. Now, as in a dream where a reprieve is granted via mysterious channels at the last possible juncture, some of them became convinced that the Civil War was long over, safely contained in plaques, flags, and benignly fading statuary. They began to chant, “We survived! The Civil War is behind us now, and here we stand, victorious, west of the crisis, in virgin territory at last, free to devise a new settlement and tell our story as it deserves to be told in the gilded cinema palaces of The Real Dodge City!”
“A new settlement! A new settlement!” they chanted, clinging to the horrible memory of the Civil War, whose material evidence still soaked their soft bodies, while so many of their brethren were gone, stomped like wine grapes along the yellow brick road. “To their memory,” chanted the Brothers clustered in the center of what they now called Sacrifice Square, “to their memory we consecrate this new settlement we’ve found!”
They hoisted high what puppets remained and pumped them in the smoky evening air, tiny wooden mouths frantic with glee, while behind them, another family of goats was slaughtered and a ritual pyre was stoked, and new stands began to emerge, selling hard cider from yellow oil drums and Civil War uniforms in the blue and grey trim of the two sides whose irreconcilable differences had shaken the fledgling nation to its core.
“Reenact the foundation crisis!” shouted the Squimbops who’d taken it upon themselves to become uniform salesmen. “For tonight we celebrate those who gave their lives to the Civil War, we honor them by donning their uniforms and retracing their footsteps, as Brothers . . . Brother against Brother to the death of all, here again as it was before, in the earliest days of Dodge City!”
As soon as the remaining Squimbops had donned the uniforms of their respective sides, half blue and half grey, the excitement of the reprieve began to wear off and some of them again began to suspect that, grim as the notion might be, The Real Dodge City Civil War was in fact still to come. For the second time today, they felt the bliss of true arrival fade into a shadowland of premonition, still awaiting its chance to come true.
“Not yet!” they began to shout. “We haven’t reached the Postwar Era just yet!”
“First the War, then the Postwar Era!” they shouted, the words as familiar as the mummers’ songs had been. “No rest until the blood of our enemies runs deeper than the blood of our comrades ever could! No solid ground of Dodge City until its mortar has been mixed with the blood we must first spill in earnest!”
“Perfect reenactment!” insisted one contingent, while the other countered, “No reenactment at all! The Real Dodge City Civil War is about to begin at last!”
Like so were the battle lines drawn, as those decked out in blue and in gray departed in identical columns from Sacrifice Square, which either already commemorated or was soon to commemorate the blood spilled for the sake of a sane future in a Dodge City waiting to be made Real, where each Squimbop would know his place and his heritage and would pass such knowledge onto whatever children he was fated to have, with a wife who would admire him equally for the journey he’d undertaken and the stasis he’d settled into upon reaching that journey’s western terminus.
Simultaneously jittering with the mania that precedes a massacre and still cognizant of the biopic they’d come to Dodge City to sell, they set out marching toward the warehouses and backlots of The Dodge City Film Industry, urged on by a collective force that already knew where the climactic battle would play out.
But first they marched past the Temple, downtown’s flagship cinema, done up in a mixture of Aztec and Egyptian styles. The Coming Soon boxes out front were empty, but Tommy Bruno was already at the concession stand, popping a fresh batch of popcorn and stocking the empty shelves with Twizzlers and Raisinets. He nodded sagely at the Squimbops who peeled off from the march, loosened their uniforms, and filed into the theater, hardly bothering to mask their shame at the decision to watch the Civil War from the comfort of plush reclining seats, indifferent to however long the footage might take to arrive.
Those determined to produce this footage marched on, back through the Outskirts and into a sandy stretch of desert between where the main road ended and the path into the replica town maintained by The Dodge City Film Industry began. The moon simmered on the horizon as the desert closed in, and in its light they could see that the farm curtain they’d all passed through was still open, admitting more duos from the ranch- and farmhouses of Ransom County, conscripted directly into a Civil War whose underlying conditions they’d never be invited to absorb.
These new recruits, already forgetting the life stories that just a moment ago they’d believed they were on the verge of selling as The True Story of the Brothers Squimbop, swarmed both armies, filtering into and swelling their ranks to such a degree that some began to worry whether there’d be enough space among them for blades and bullets to fly.
Crushed together just as they’d been on the yellow brick road, they watched the moon float up to the middle of the sky as they marched out of the desert and into The Dodge City Film Industry’s version of Sacrifice Square, fringed by a grove of warheads, silently standing guard, a becalmed but volatile Stonehenge that none paused long enough to salute.
Beyond the warheads, the night boiled with creamy off-white static as the Brothers separated into their respective sides and listened as their respective generals made their opening remarks, one insisting on reenactment, the other on that which would one day be reenacted, with only the covenant of War itself to decide which account the future would consider true.
When all had said their piece, they loaded their muskets, screwed on their bayonets, and surged into the alleys and backlots of the replica town, defending their positions with the full zeal of men who knew that most would not see the dawn.
“Brother against Brother!” declared the offstage voice they could still hear running through their heads. “A bloodbath the likes of which none had seen before, fought with technologies that would forever alter the sacred proving ground of the battlefield, in which men become Men before becoming meat. A War, indeed, for the very soul of Dodge City and, as such, for the ongoing legacy of the Brothers Squimbop and furthermore, for the legacy of America itself. For all this, for the True Story and its sequels beyond counting, tonight we rage!”
The War raged as promised through the night, tearing the very fiber of time asunder so that here, in no uncertain terms, the future itself was at stake. Suddenly, it was not inconceivable that the entire Squimbop Saga might extinguish itself, leaving nothing but cacti and lizards to see the sunrise.
Some Brothers ran to the equipment sheds and attempted to film the carnage, as if seizing control of the biopic could be that simple, but they were easily dispatched by the volleys of canon and missile fire launched from the weapons that had likewise been dragged from those sheds, all of them laid out to be used in exactly this way, in this exact time and place, while the other Brothers, the cowards and pacifists among them, dozed in the Temple watching the screen buzz with the same loop of pre-trailer advertisements over and over again—radiant Kentucky bourbon in an etched-glass Squimbop canister on ice, platinum or white gold mime-and-uncle cufflinks free with a blue or pink silk deluxe Squimbop Suit upgrade, dentures as sharp and white as the living teeth of the legendary Professor Squimbop himself, fed on a strict diet of full-cream milk and raw beef—until it grew as familiar as the litany of a religion absorbed in earliest childhood, before its signifiers amounted to anything more than the promise of a totalizing benevolent attention at work everywhere in the universe.
As the battle raged on, no advantage emerged. The question of whether they were reenacting the Civil War or enacting it for the first time was both primary and secondary at once, insofar as it determined the purpose of the mass bloodshed they were now unleashing, yet also, as that bloodshed took on a logic of its own, there were ever fewer heads to house the question whose resolution the death of their fellows was expected to produce, nor, as these fellows continued to drop, even many heads left to absorb the answer when it came.
To make matters worse, berserkers began to arrive. Lunatics, psychopaths, Squimbops from villages deep in the nation’s interior, where multi-generational blood feuds were still the only means of achieving restitution. The farm curtain flapped open to admit them, still dusty from the Kansan roads they’d traveled clutching their shovels and pitchforks, barely able to wait for the chance to do the one thing they knew they could succeed at.
They thronged the battlefield, naked or in street clothes or Squimbop Suits they’d picked up on their travels, hacking and slashing and firing into the crowd. As the Civil War grew increasingly illegible in terms of any side versus any other, a secondary uniform industry sprouted up along the peripheries, manned by those who’d declared themselves veterans. They roamed the battlefield skinning fallen Squimbops and tanning their hides in brilliant yellows and greens and reds, so that even from this chaos the semblance of a multivalent Great Power Conflict emerged, a full-blown World War growing, according to well-established precedent, out of what, earlier in the evening, had been a mere domestic dispute.
The more Squimbops fell, the more arrived, in almost perfect parity—an instantly iconic slapstick routine in its own right—as the legend of the Civil War that was fast becoming a World War spread through the Dust Bowl, offering a last-ditch reprieve from the economic drought that had throttled half the nations on Earth.
The scale of violence grew proportionally, breaking the bounds of the original biopic and bleeding directly into a sequel, or a series of sequels, spinning with a centrifugal force that threatened to suck in all of the living, pulling the Black Forest in from the east and the Pacific Theater in from the west, compressing it all into a town-sized black hole of such density that all those who’d survived thus far would be compacted into a single grain of sand, within which they’d have no choice but to go on fighting forever.
Thus the chaos reached a stalemate, bleeding every side dry as rival papers issued front page stories declaring rival victories and self-published books began to line the costume and puppet racks, alleging that the entirety of the visible war was nothing but a front for an intractable cabal that thrived on the confusion of its unwitting subjects, wresting a form of absolute control from the appearance of global disorder, while, at the same time, self-published books debunking those that made this claim likewise sprang up, just ahead of the crop debunking them in turn.
Out of this untenable condition, a single Squimbop, maddened by the mise en abyme that he could tell was just beginning, unless the way in which it seemed to be just beginning was itself a cleverly seeded delusion, marched beyond the battlefield and back to the henge of warheads, panting with the enormity of what he could sense he was about to do.
He stood in the shadow of the nukes, running his long fingers through his short hair, and gave himself all the time he needed to make his decision. Beneath the clouds of mustard gas and Agent Orange, the fray of musket and cannon fire, and the combined shrieking of those impaled on bayonets and those attempting to narrate the carnage for a proliferating stable of rival news outlets, he counted his inhales and exhales and began to develop an image in his mind of a Bachelor’s Cell on a dark corner at the edge of Dodge City, lit only by the glowing white of the supermarket next door. He could see himself in that room, over the years, gazing out the window through all that white glow and across the battlefield to the cluster of nukes he stood within now. He began to remember standing at the window studying the shadows the warheads cast in the moonlight, and then he remembered scribbling at his desk in the supermarket glow, page after page of blue ink on yellow paper, birthing his manifesto one frantic line at a time, his plan for a post-nuclear Dodge City, an end to the stalemate at last, a finale to the War that could only otherwise go on and on and on, indifferent to the passing of generations, turning into a grotesque form of stability from which it would become impossible to break free, given that War itself remained the only means known to man of leaving one historic era behind and compelling the next to begin.
The more he worked at his desk, the more he worked himself back in time, deeper into the Manifesto, so that now he could also see himself sourcing the uranium from Dead Sir, the swamp just outside Dodge City where, according to the legends that the Manifesto cited, all that the town sought to collectively forget was buried, gone but not gone, a function that—he wrote—perhaps all towns needed a swamp to provide, if they hoped to cross the brink where the past finally became the present. “So here I am at Dead Sir,” he wrote, “paddling on a skiff of lashed-together vegetable crates, fishing for the uranium that was buried on the bottom after the last nuclear holocaust, because none is ever the first, just as no Cold War begins in a vacuum.”
He could see himself dredging up fistfuls of the buried element, which, as he’d known it would, had only grown more potent from steeping in the silt of all that Dodge City sought to repress. He dredged it up and, over the course of long, feverish nights on the Outskirts of town, while the rest of the population battled on and every death summoned a new Squimbop through the curtain, he assembled the warheads, piece by laborious piece, growing ever more convinced that only a single, decisive blow could end the stalemate that had gripped the culture. “No future without annihilation,” he wrote, in the Manifesto that he’d begun to call My Nuclear Dissertation. He cobbled the warheads together one by one, sweating even when the nights were cold and sustaining himself on eggs and burnt toast from the diner in the center of town, where he worked three mornings a week to support his project for as long as it took. “No way out but through, no green lawns and white picket fences without first pulling the ultimate trigger.”
When his project was complete, the Professor—the title followed the completion of his Dissertation—wiped his silty hands on his pockets, dragged over an empty vegetable crate from the replica supermarket, and, standing upon it, announced into the general fray, though he had no illusion that his voice would be heard, “This stalemate must end! The nuclear era has guaranteed that no decisive victory is possible. We cower, instead, in terror of the earth-shattering technologies our forefathers fashioned out of the quantum disturbance of the last World War, and satisfy ourselves with an endless succession of proxy wars that never result in the clarifying epochal shift we so profoundly crave and, indeed, deserve. No, instead, these minatory witnesses,” he patted the nearest warhead, “have locked us into an endlessly self-perpetuating present. A zombie present, decades beyond its expiration date, and yet unable to expire because our fear of the future,” he patted the warhead again, harder, nearly slapping it, “has sealed us inside a loop where time can only grow stranger and stranger and stranger, as we play at war without allowing it to swell into the kind of seismic historical shift that man-to-man violence, in its very essence, exists in order to activate. The very reason we wage war, the dim yet sacred hope of peace on the other side, is an utter sham so long as these monstrosities watch over the battlefield, mocking it in silence!” He pounded the warhead now, loud enough to send off an echoing ping!
Though the melee continued, several Squimbops did turn to regard him lighting a match and holding it down by the warhead’s fuse. Several even appeared to bow as the fuse sparked alight and the flame began to travel. As it reached the reagent and the warhead shuddered and then soared upward, the War came to a halt and an instant of perfect communal clarity ensued, a pause while the warhead described its parabola across the nighttime desert, hanging silent and nearly motionless, as if briefly conscious enough to gaze down upon all it was about to destroy, pointing like the finger of God so that, if anyone were watching from a safe enough distance, they’d know just where Dodge City used to stand.
Then, perhaps spooked by its own sudden self-awareness, it fell. Screaming and boiling downward, it crashed into the foam cobblestones, incinerating them on contact before billowing outward in a mushroom cloud that precisely resembled the thousands that Professor Squimbop had studied in the long, lonely nights in his Bachelor’s Cell, the pages of his Dissertation lit only by the glowing white supermarket next door, itself a perfect fluorescent emblem of the Postwar Era he so longed to find a way to reach.
All went black. Then, slowly, greyish-white fog filled the scene and the Professor blinked, spit out grit and bone chips, and got to his feet, wincing in the rank air of the world he’d wrought. The foam cobblestones had melted and the desert sand beneath them had turned to glass, which he skated across, away from the carnage and into The Dodge City Postwar Era, real now for the first time, though it was in every regard just as he’d described it. In the distance, the farm curtains had fused with the horizon; they looked painted on, like relics from an age that had turned archaic overnight.
“So it begins,” he thought, walking out into the ruins, nostrils flared as the fallout began to mix with his mucus and turn his saliva sour. It took him the first part of the day to realize that he’d written nothing on this contingency, having assumed that he wouldn’t be here to see it. “Indeed,” he thought now, “my starting position, despite the green lawns and white picket fences and overstocked supermarkets I must’ve described to the point of morbid obsession, was that no one would be.”
“Therefore, all that follows,” he heard an offstage voice confirm, “will for you be a kind of afterlife. A kind of heaven or a kind of hell. That much, Professor, is up to you.”
I stand there squinting in the nuclear sunrise, blinking and licking my lips, my whole body sore like I’ve either just given birth or just been born. I gag as an image arises of my Brothers hurtling down a sinkhole, clotted together like a ball of mucus and hair, leaving me alone in a future that shouldn’t exist. I picture them under Dead Sir, down in the muck the uranium arose from, where they will in time revert to that same element, so that a future Squimbop, eons hence, will once again fish them out to make the bomb whose impact has rendered the world just the way it is this morning, once Dodge City has fed the Postwar Era back into its own ever-hungry Foundation Mythos and reached a new legitimacy crisis, which will in turn necessitate a new Civil and then a new World War.
I swallow and pinch my nose, trying to force down the feeling that the future Squimbop I’ve just now pictured will likewise be me, just as convincingly, or just as tenuously, as “this morning’s Squimbop”—a term I wish hadn’t just come to mind—is me as well.
When I close my eyes again, fallout settles on my eyelids. Beneath them, I see a mime, a ship, a mass grave, and a mushroom cloud, spinning like cards in a zoetrope, until they feel burned into the skin under my eyelids, an imprint of the fallout itself, a barcode stamped on the soft flesh of the Squimbop that, for now, I’m obliged to call me.
I squint and sputter and step backwards over a cold, soft lump that sends me sprawling onto my back. My head bounces against the melted Styrofoam and hits the glass beneath, causing my teeth to clack together. This triggers a scene of a street-choking procession descending on the town, armed with wooden puppets, their teeth clacking even louder than mine as they spew stories of conquest and adventure, of the glories of the Civil War that has finally ended, and is soon to begin.
Once I’ve gotten my mouth closed again, I roll over and push myself up, wincing not so much from pain as from the numbness that now fills my body, revealing what I’d both hoped and feared would be the case—that I’m on the other side of something, here and not here in a manner impossible to describe using the language of whatever life I’d been living before.
Back on my feet, I begin to survey the damage. I walk among the corpses—“my fallen Brothers,” I feel compelled to call them, though nothing in me feels any kinship with these bloated bodies clad in the dyed skins of their own fallen forebears—and I lose or fail to generate whatever thought I’d expected to have upon beholding them. I yawn, squint again, and find myself back in the zoetrope of mime, ship, mushroom cloud, and mass grave, a sequence whose compulsive reiteration fills me with shame.
I swallow and continue my grim route, beginning to wonder—this too feels predetermined, like I’m on a walking tour of the Media Center with a guide who’s already done two or three such tours today—whether I killed all these men, and if not, whether I’ll be blamed for it anyway. “As the lone survivor of whatever happened, it stands to reason . . . ” I hear the offstage voice assert, though, for the moment, it asserts nothing else.
In its absence, my mind loops back to the burden of selling the life rights for the True Story to whichever proponents of The Dodge City Film Industry remain. I picture them lined up in a dim boardroom, their notarized contracts and Mont Blanc pens reflecting back to them on a smooth onyx tabletop. Though I tremble on the threshold, I don’t resist when an aide pushes me inside and closes the door before I can turn, sealing me in there with the board members, the True Story now only what I say it is. I nod to all the aging men and women in identical silk suits, all of their eyes on me though their attention is clearly elsewhere, as they sip mineral water from sheer glass cubes and tap painted nails along the line where my signature belongs. I swallow, then I sign. Then I swoon.
I awaken on my back beneath a boiling Tommy Bruno hologram. His gaunt cheeks, lightly stubbled, and bald head fringed with two tufts of black curls look down upon me, his mouth opening and closing without seeming to speak. I lie there and watch as the hologram zooms out, revealing the concession stand that has followed me all around North America. Now, in a medium shot, Tommy Bruno sells popcorn and Raisenets to dozens of Squimbops who take their turns in single file, flickering like those reels of workers climbing on and off of locomotives in the very first days of the cinematic medium.
The hologram boils, dissolves, then drifts back together to reveal row upon row of nearly catatonic men waiting in a dim theater, watching the pre-trailer advertisements again and again and again, all blinking in unison as they dig into their treats. I try to sit up, but my body is numb to the point of uselessness, like all my nerves have been cut, leaving only sacs of fat and muscle atop bones that no longer have the power to compel them to move.
I try to swallow but taste only fallout, my mouth packed with dense, crunchy dust that I can neither chew nor spit. So I lie there, my Adam’s apple vibrating to no effect, as the hologram darkens then comes alight with a blazing True Story of the Brothers Squimbop title card. A cheer goes up in the theater as the opening credits play, and I see Tommy Bruno sneak in beneath the exit sign, a solid indication that he’s never seen this one before.
Something in the numb back of my head flickers as the rest of me prepares to leave this body and enter the one at large in the True Story. Only the flicker clocks the violation, the abandonment of what, a moment from now, I’ll no longer believe was ever me.
Then I’m gone, back on my usual stool at the diner where I’ve worked for years, hunched over my cup of too-sweet coffee and my usual plate of eggs and burnt toast. I lean against the overfamiliar counter and watch, on the TV mounted above the rack of vintage bourbon bottles and baseball pennants, a work crew dredging a gigantic houseboat out of a swamp. Picking at my breakfast, I try to keep the vision of what happens next from flooding back in. I can see myself floating away on that houseboat, taking to the waves which, loosed by the nuclear blast, have begun to flood inward, restoring to Middle America the Inland Sea that has already covered it at least once, rendering Dodge City an island, soon to sink.
The offstage voice, which sounds pinched and enervated now, says, “Proceed to the cinema, the show is about to begin. The show within the show, the molten core of the True Story itself, the safe harbor you think you left me for.”
The abruptness of this phrase causes me to turn so quickly on my barstool that I knock my coffee into my eggs, causing two hefty truckers to laugh so hard that they too spill their coffees into their eggs, causing two more truckers to laugh, and spill, and . . . in the far background, as I’m reminded of the room in which the self I abandoned lies watching, I hear the Squimbops in the theater laugh as well, slapping their thighs and spilling Raisinets between their seats.
“Well?” the voice asks, and I look around, desperately, coffee soaking my khakis as the TV shows the boat balanced beside the swamp, while an anchor says, “And there we have it, folks . . . The Dodge City Angel House Exhibit has been officially exhumed from Dead Sir, dislodged by the colossal blast that set The Dodge City Post-war Era in motion, and is hence ready for its maiden voyage, all the way to its berth at the Squimbop Media Center in Cooperstown, NY, as if the very events for which it’s been canonized have, in reality, not yet occurred but are now, after generations of waiting, finally about to!”
All the soaked truckers clap in what strikes me as a particularly postwar manner, a tense combination of macho triumphalism and nascent paranoia, as the enormity of what was hashed out abroad begins to seep into the woodwork at home. They crowd me, their eyes ashy and unfocused, as if they were no more than avatars of the Squimbops laughing and munching in the darkened theater, with Tommy Bruno standing by the exit behind them. They draw nearer with each impact, their feet following their hands as they clap in syncopated unison. I blot eggy coffee from my pockets, slip off the barstool, and run, elbowing three clappers aside as I ding the bell on my way out.
I run down the ruined main street of Dodge City, over puppets smashed flat as fossils, as more and more clappers emerge, coming up from alleys and down from stairwells and out from the bus and then the train station, masses of drifters in Squimbop Suits just now arriving. “Board the ship! Board the ship!” they chant. “Deliver us, before the waters close in, before the tidal wave washes all the . . .”
They chant this again and again, coming in and out of sync, sometimes doubling each other’s voices and sometimes cutting each other off, driving me toward the Temple, where the line snakes three times around the block. “The True Story of the Brothers Squimbop: OPENING TONIGHT” glows on the marquee, surrounded by pulsing flashbulbs.
As I run, my bowels tremble and I scan the line, wondering what would happen if I forced my way in past these hundreds of identical men, ghosts, and veterans waiting side by side to view the spectacle for whose production they gave their lives. I picture myself shoving past them, past the concession stand and down to that bathroom in the basement where the subway maps of Paris and London surely still run together above the urinals, forcing my way into a stall at the last possible second.
I see myself emerging from that stall and climbing the stairs onto a tremendous ship leaving Alaska, pulling southward out of the harbor, captained, now as ever, by Professor Squimbop. I try to picture him speaking to me, or miming his old speech, sending me back to Kansas to relive my origin story as one half of an iconic duo just setting out along the yellow brick road, but now, try as I might, I cannot force myself back into that scene. “Now it’s only you, my friend,” the voice shrieks in my ear. “You left me on my back with my nerves sliced to shoelaces. Now it’s only you and you and you and you!!”
As the voice ripples and bends, traveling through the fallout or emerging directly from it, the air begins to smell like seawater and each clap—the thousands of waiting Squimbops are synchronized now, shaking Dodge City like children in a cardboard castle—knocks deeper cracks in the sky and surrounding air, through which seawater begins to spill.
I spit as the first salty gust passes my lips, and I can tell, with a certainty I’ve never felt before that this, exactly now, is the only moment of decision I’ll ever have. Everything I am, whatever that may be, will only endure based on what I do next. I eye the line one last time, contemplating grabbing one of the Squimbops and taking him with me as a dummy Brother, a prop version of what I’ve lost, but then a wave crashes over us, wiping out half the line, and I’m swimming through it with Squimbops drowning all around me, fighting for the houseboat that has been unearthed from Dead Sir for my sake alone, to serve as the vessel upon which my journey across the Inland Sea will begin.
So my decision has been made, perhaps longer ago than I imagine. The waves carry me over the death throes of Dodge City, as thousands of Squimbops are swept into the sunken cinema below, and I crawl up the rigging on the side of the boat when it bobs into reach, coughing and crying as the same voice says, “Welcome aboard, Professor.”
Then I’m on the upper deck, falling sideways along what feels like a waterfall, full of fish and crabs and eels, careening through a slamming door and down a wooden staircase, washing into a soaked office where books, papers, and bottles of wine float, clinking together in welcome.
I fight my way to my feet and then, exhaling so deeply my lungs go flat against my ribs, I stride over to the window to watch Dodge City vanish beneath the waves, one more Atlantis among so many thousands—thousands behind me, and thousands more to come. Through the window, the air is fuzzy and grey and I can’t help picturing the nerveless, flattened self I left behind, lying on his back with all of this playing out as a hologram before eyes that will never blink again.
As if to confirm that I’m no longer him, I blink several times. Then I turn and look up the soaked staircase, deciding that this nerveless viewer is up there, in the Master Bedroom watching the film whose sale he brokered play out unto eternity, starring whoever I am now.
“And who’s that?” he asks. “Who is it that’s spending the money I earned, living like an aging bachelor prince on the houseboat I purchased?”
“I did this for you, not me,” I reply, as a bottle of port bobs against my ankle. “So that one of us might live to tell the tale. To spread the gospel from town to town, so deep into the Postwar Era that that the War itself will soon be forgotten. Is this not what we wanted when we were young?”
As I bend down to pick up the bottle and read the label in cursive Portuguese, I wonder whether all those drowned Squimbops are proud to know I’ve escaped, or if I’ve damned them by leaving like this, consigning Dodge City to the fate of all towns rather than sacrificing myself upon the altar of its singularity.
My eyes tear up as the boat begins to chart its course. I can hear the wheel creaking overhead, driven by my Distant Master, as I’ve decided to call him, sprawled painlessly in the Master Bedroom. I remove my soaked clothes, pull on a plush red robe I find hanging by the door, embossed with Prof. Sq. in gold cursive above its fuzzy breast pocket, pour a snifter full of port, pat a life-sized Tommy Bruno cutout on his bald spot, and begin to rifle through the video collection, neatly arranged on an adjacent shelf. The Brothers Squimbop, The Brothers Squimbop in Europe, The Brothers Squimbop in Hollywood, Squimbop Fever, The Brothers Squimbop in Kansas.
I wipe my eyes on my sleeve, refill my snifter, select The True Story of the Brothers Squimbop, Vol. 1 from a seven-video boxed set, pop it in the VCR, and sit down on the couch just as the FBI warning fades into a master shot of thousands of duos marching along the bloody, bloody Road to Dodge City. Though I know it won’t amount to much, I use all my remaining energy to hold myself back for a long, breathless moment, before leaning in to study the screen, in search of myself and my Brother, lost but still discernible somewhere in the flux. 
David Leo Rice is a writer living in New York City. His books include A Room in Dodge City, A Room in Dodge City: Vol. 2, Angel House, and Drifter: Stories, and The New House.
Illustration: Jan Robert Duennweller
