Irony Poisoning.

This was the third parody I wrote for Fiction II.

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(draft 1.5 again, and no, I won't acknowledge it as a 2nd draft)


FICTION II
02/25/08
Parody III: The Metamorphosis


Irony Poisoning.


When Merald Kroach woke up at 4:19 on Tuesday morning he was still human. He slept in his own bed in his own room of his own apartment. When he woke up at 4:19, rolled over a little to look at the clock and make a hypnagogic deduction that two hours and some minutes between then and the time the alarm was set for provided plenty more time for sleep, he fell back into his fitful dreams which always seemed to be about things which eluded his conscious mind. But anyway--he reasoned while giving a few moments of thought to it when awake before getting on with important things in his life like crunching numbers at the accounting firm--dreams weren't meant to be understood at all, not by the analytical mind, and so he quickly dismissed whatever he remembered about his restless dreams.

When Merald Kroach woke up at 4:19 in his own bed, covered with green and blue flannel sheets and a thick pleated quilt his grandmother had made which kept him warm on even the coldest of nights, he was still human. The room around him was very much his own, with a few Spartan personal items; bare walls and a closetful of nearly identical suits, a night stand with most un-decorative lamp and simple digital alarm clock with buzzer and radio, simple wooden beige chest of drawers over in the corner held his socks and underwear, and a box set on top with his neatly-arranged tie-tacks and cuff-links. That is also where he placed, at night before going to bed, his wrist watch, cell phone, and PDA.

Everything in the dark quiet hour of 4 a.m. was as if should be in Merald Kroach's room. Ordered and neat and evident.

Nothing about the room or objects in it had changed during the next few hours that Merald Kroach slept. Although he had never done so in his entire life, last night before going to bed, Merald Kroach forgot to set the alarm on his digital clock. At 6:35 a.m. the alarm did, in fact, not go off, and for the first time in his entire life, Merald Kroach overslept.

Ordinarily, the alarm would awake him at 6:35 and he would be out of bed by 6:45 when the coffee machine started brewing a pot; shower and shave, 6:55; toast with butter and two cups of coffee and he was out of the apartment at 7:20 to catch the train into the accounting firm to sit down at his cubical desk at 7:55, where stacks of papers with numerous columns of numbers waited his attention. Numbers didn't leave any room for interpretations and comparisons. Numbers were factual and definite.

Weren't they?

This morning, 6:35 a.m. came and went without a sound, because he had forgotten to set it. It was 8:23 when he opened his eyes to the brightness of a day already several hours old.

Merald Kroach opened his eyes and the clock seemed indistinct and out of focus to him. He tried rubbing his ideas but his thought of doing so slipped into a foggy gray area of his head and he suddenly didn't feel like himself at all.

He felt like...like...like he was a bug, trapped beneath his grandmother's quilt, lying in bed; like he was a prisoner and his bedroom and the apartment and even everything in town was merely a façade meant to give him the false sense of normalcy; like everything was familiar but he was alien and foreign to it; like he was a stranger in a strange land.

Merald Kroach tried to roll over in bed but the best he could do was lie as he was and imagine jelly rolls and drums rolls and rolling, rolling, rolling down the river. His thoughts drifting from an old song to Mark Twain using the Mississippi River as a whatchamacallit for Life. A model or something, Merald thought, but was reaching for another idea.

But he felt helpless as a child; like a fish out of water; flaccid as an overripe cliché.

What was wrong with him? Why couldn't he move?

He tried to roll over again, or at least lift an arm, but found he couldn't exactly feel his body anymore. Maybe he was paralyzed?

Frozen in place like a wet tongue to a metal pole in subzero weather, heavy as a lead elephant. With every thought, his mind would slip away from the subject he tried to focus on, but it would slip away from anything concrete like water glistening off a rainbowed-surface of oil--like three hillbillies in a mud farm trying to catch a greased hog.

The clock showed 8:51, and Merald Kroach still lay like a stump on a log, unable to move beneath his pleated quilt blanket. Usually by this time of the morning at the accounting firm he'd be as busy as a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest.

This was insane! Why couldn't he move? What happened to him?

Even though he felt unable to move, Merald Kroach wasn't in any actual physical pain. Just frustrated by his thoughts not being able to focus clearly on anything, and the growing concern that such abstract mental processes were certainly going to be a hindrance at the accounting firm.

Perhaps this was one of those--what do you call them?--lucid dreams? That's it! He was awake inside a very vivid dream. And that meant he must still be sleeping.

He suddenly felt very reassured. Yes, that was it...this was one of those minute brief dreams he sometimes had between snooze bar hits. The alarm had gone off and he fell back asleep immediately and he was dreaming that it was after 9 a.m. and he had transformed from being a human into being some sort of ghost of Christmas past, shadow of a thought, will-o-wisp of the mind.

Any moment now, the alarm was going to go off again and Merald Kroach was going to get up and get on with his morning as usual--shower and shave his very human face--then head off to work at the accounting firm and crunch the numbers that define finances and business and politics and news and life and important things like that. He had no time for pondering silly ideas and allusions.

Numbers were what mattered. Good, concrete, invariable numbers----like the Square Root of Negative One, Gauss's Constant, Pi, or Zero...?

Merald Kroach's brain itched like a ten-year-old with chicken pox and ants in his pants. He wasn't used to having circular thoughts that slid away from things like snot off a doorknob. Every time he'd think of something, his mind would tangent off into some sort of similar comparison of what he wanted to think of, and wind up wandering a starry desert looking for the trail of where he began. Trapped like a rat in a cage he made and now he'd have to lie in it.

Stop it! he wanted to shout, but the best he could do was briefly form some sort of analogy to what he wanted to think about.

Then the dawning awareness struck him like a ton of gold bricks.

Merald Kroach woke up to find himself transformed into an alliterative metaphor! He'd become some sort of allegory typed into the lines of a structural parody!

The thought was insane, crazy as a loon, mad as a hatter. But what else could it be? His mind raced down a white-water stream of consciousness, flushed into a swirling spiral of similes into the rhetorical murk and muck of anthropomorphic pathos. His proverbial blood froze at the flittering metonymic thought: What if in his being transformed into an allusionary idea in a work of metafiction, the Author-Creator never hit SAVE? What would happen to him?

He had to escape from this pastiche world...break through the Fourth Wall and return to his analytical life. However this happened didn't matter any more than growing a third testicle, but he needed to find a way out from this story before it fell into a mess of plot holes or infinite recursion.

How would McGuyver get out of this? What about James Bond? Indiana Jones escaped dire situations dozens of times, but he had a whip and a hat when he did. And a human body...

Since his thoughts seemed to be his body, maybe he could imagine a place, really see it, then think of some words and they might become the reality of what he imagined they could be. He'd imagine himself out of being a metaphor.

However he was going to do it, he had to make it quick. What if he lay here like unnoticed McGuffin and starved to death? Or worse, what if someone from the firm came over and found him like this? A mere figmentary parable, a rhetorical trope, a literary device...

What were those things called that always seemed to come in and save the day at the end of thriller stories?

The Calvary? No. Superman...? Han Solo? Chechov's gun?

He wasn't sure what Chechov's gun was, but if he had it, he'd be sure to use it!

Enough of this! Merald Kroach imagined he yelled, tasting the bitter irony poisoning of his situation. Then the idea fluttered past him like a drunken butterfly stumbling home from a three-day bender. The way out! He thought of the thing that could get him out of this...this whatchamacallit!

That was it, he finally decided, clutching to the epiphany before it had a chance to slip away like a squiggling fish and turn into something else...

Since he was a metaphor in a short story parody of some Phildickian-Kafkaesque piece of fiction, he was going to need a Deus Ex Machina to get out of this.

English or Latin -- it was all just Greek to him.


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