[Tyr Zalo Hawk]: 712.Stories.ShortStories.BOOM! Success!.Draft 2

The first time I saw Doctor Professor F I thought I might have been safer outside, with the tigers. He had something in the way of Einstein’s hair. It was grey and frizzy, the sort of thing a bird would nest in if given the chance, something he wouldn’t stand for on the majority of Tuesdays. His eyes were there, presumably, beneath the thick blast goggles, and his skin was the most wondrous shade of off-white. He had on mismatched socks, tie-dye boxer-briefs, and not much else. Most worrisome though, was the inescapable fact that he was holding a flamethrower in my direction, grinning in a way that puts any cartoon character I’ve ever seen to shame. Looking back on it now, it seems so silly that I was afraid of the tigers.
“Hi.” I managed to squeak out, hoping he wouldn’t view standard human greetings as a threat.
“Hellooo.” He sang back to me, fingers idly twitching at the firing mechanism of the flamethrower.
“They sent me to help you. Said you needed a umm… an… a uhh…”
“Are you going to Nicaragua? Or Finland?”
Whatever doubts I may have been facing in the ways of word choice melted at the chance to answer the questions of a man with the ability to incinerate me. “No! I’m in college. And I’ve never even been outside of the state before, why would I want to-”
“Good.” He lowered the flamethrower and smiled, letting out a sigh of relief. “I gotta tell ya, kiddo, I’m gonna be awfully scared there for a bit. I’m about to think you’re one of those new-age ‘Power Rangers’ I’m eventually going to hear about on the radio.” Doctor Professor F closed his eyes, sighed again, and handed me his weapon. “Now, come along. We’ve a lot of questionable pursuits to commit ourselves to,” he stopped, checked his watch, “in Utopsia!”
I knew in that exact moment, holding that flamethrower as my employer walked towards a narrow door at the back of what was supposed to be an office, that I had made the second largest error of my collegiate life. Within fifteen seconds of conversation I had managed to ally myself with a man who considered the Power Rangers as ‘new-age’ and dangerous. I followed him; I think that was my biggest mistake.
I made my way to the doorway, examining the room as I went. There were what must have been a thousand open books, stacked in columns that looked like they were meant to hold the ceiling up. Each stack was arranged by color, and, by some miracle, there were no two stacks of the same color. Off to the left there was a desk, a DOS computer, and a picture I couldn’t quite make out while I was walking. It reminded me vaguely of the Discovery Channel.
Behind the door there were stairs. These particular stairs were invisible beneath the flamethrower I was handling and the darkness that comes without interior lighting. The fact that I was staring in nearly the opposite direction didn’t help either. I don’t recall much about the fall itself, just pain, clangs, and the accidental gout of flame when my hand tried to grab for something and found a trigger. Approximately 30 stairs later my fall was broken by my employer’s legs. I lay there for at least 15 seconds, staring upwards at shapes I couldn’t quite make out in the darkness, something which I am now entirely glad for. “Uhnnn…” I groaned. My head was throbbing, my body was aching, and I knew at least one bone had shifted to somewhere it shouldn’t ever be. “Profes-“
“That’s Doctor Professor F! I’m not gonna spend three days locked inside the Dean’s office with a shotgun to just be ‘Professor F’!” Each word echoed up and down the stairwell as he shouted, and my headache pounded in unison.
“Doctor Professor F, could you help me up? I think my arm’s dislocated.”
“Got that flamethrower with ya, kiddo?”
I was beginning to think he didn’t listen. Checking around, I felt for the flamethrower which I had luckily landed atop of and nodded. My head protested at the movement, keeping me from noticing the growing pain in my left arm for a few more seconds. “Ya, I got it.”
“Then get yourself up with that! Utopsia can’t be kept waiting!” At this, Doctor Professor F leapt down the last ten or so stairs and opened a much wider door, casting a glow out that reached all the way to where the flamethrower and I were struggling to my feet.
Despite the pain, I was drawn towards the dull light like a moth to a bug lamp. Even though I knew that it could only be bad news to keep going, I lumbered on. Something inside my head, I was beginning to realize, couldn’t say no to the Doctor Professor, something which, at the time, made me wonder if madness wasn’t contagious. The fact that my arm was trying to detach itself from the rest of my body was, however, a more pressing matter and therefore took up the bulk of my thinking capacity. I stepped in through the doorway and forgot my pain temporarily.
Inside there were tubes of questionably colored… mucks. A fog hung about the floor, and a thick cloud hung along the ceiling; both were changing colors. The far wall was covered in one dollar bills, each individually laminated and nailed to the wall through George Washington’s face. The other walls seemed liked they were made of Jell-O; I found out quite soon that they actually were. Something moved on the floor, but I couldn’t bring myself to look down and see what, just in case. Doctor Professor F had wasted no time in getting to work, and already had a sledgehammer raised well above his head. There was only a moment to check what he was aiming for, and my eyes couldn’t move nearly as fast as the hammer did.
There was a crash, a bang, and my employer hit one of the Jell-O walls with a                             thckkssshhkloop! I thought about asking him if he needed help, but about that time my arm kicked back into fighting form and I nearly doubled over. “Success!” the Doctor Professor cried out as he removed himself from the wall. He returned to the table, picked up whatever he had apparently just hit, and then came straight at me. I was temporarily reminded of a tiger lunging at me, and so I reeled backwards. Unlike the tigers though, Doctor Professor F wasn’t chained to the wall. When he finally stopped coming, he was a centimeter from me, and orange gelatin was dripping off of him and onto me. “Eat this!” For a moment, I thought he meant the gelatin; then he shoved something into my mouth, turned away, and started for another part of his lab.
I wanted to protest, to spit out whatever it was and demand some answers. Instead that something inside of me that just couldn’t say ‘no’ to this man started up the digestion process. As I chewed the god-knew-what, I was surprised that it was not only chewy, but tasted just like asparagus. My arm didn’t much care about how anything tasted, and so I swallowed, so I could discuss it with him. “Doctor Professor F… about my arm…”
“I already will!” he shouted at me, swiping at the air before lifting his sledgehammer again.
“No, I mean…” I cut out, frowning at him. What’s the use in trying to communicate with a crazy person? I thought. And then, my arm felt better. It didn’t feel incredible, or amazing, it just felt better. I stared at it in stark disbelief. To my knowledge, dislocated arms didn’t just better, especially not by themselves. There was a slam and a very loud clang, but no explosion. I looked up, saw Doctor Professor F on the recoil, and remembered his asparagus gummy. A weird sort of awe and respect manifested itself inside my head as I watched him for what must have been ten minutes. He raced around the room, throwing things at other things, hitting things with his sledgehammer, and shouting “Success!” every time something exploded. Things exploded a lot, as I soon realized. It was like I didn’t even exist to him, like nothing else in the entire world existed.
When I finally regained some level of my composure, and when Doctor Professor F was finally too imbedded in the gelatin to quickly free himself, I decided to speak again. “Thanks for the, well, the thing that helped my arm.”
“What thing?” he grunted, finally able to yank an arm free.
“That thing you gave me.”
“Gave?” he repeated the word as though I’d just told him his mother had been diagnosed with cancer. “Why would you say gave?” His left eye twitched several times in rapid succession.
“The one for my arm, you know?”
“Oh!” He grinned at me knowingly and nodded. “The one I’m going to give you.”
Now it was mine turn to be confused. “There’s another one?”
“No, no. I’m already going to give you that one for your arm. It’ll happen about,” he looked directly at me, as though reading the time from my bewildered expression, “664 seconds from now.”
I should’ve realized before I spoke again that arguing with a man like Doctor Professor F was pointless, but confusion does a funny thing to people. “But… if you’re going to give it to me, then my arm won’t feel better until you do, right?”
“Nonsense!” he called back to me as he escaped the Jell-O wall with one final full-body tug. I wondered how much Jell-O he went through a day, and where the actual walls were. “If it’s going to happen, then you’ll feel better now knowing it will.” For some reason, I was getting more confused.
I knew that my argument made sense. I had taken courses in logic, I was captain of my high school debate team, and yet I felt like I was finally learning the truth because of the assuredness with which Doctor Professor F presented his absurd comments. So, I asked for my first explanation. “I… can you explain that to me?” It went something like this.
“Kiddo, it’s like this.” From a table nearby he produced a chalkboard and from the recesses of his socks he pulled out some chalk. I still haven’t asked about that. “We’re on a line of time.” He drew a line that had a seizure. “And this end’s the future, and this other one’s the… the other one.”
“The past?” I guessed. It made his eye twitch again, but for a while longer this time.
“Yes, yes. Now, we’re over here,” his chalk pointed to the future end, “headed this way,” he traced along the messy line towards the other end, “which means that I’m going to give you the pill over here.” With the assertive nature of a grizzly bear, he hit the chalk at the very tip of the future end. “Now, get that pillow!”
I looked around for something pillow shaped while I considered what this all meant. We’re going backwards through time, and nothing has happened yet, which is                                              why things are happening now. So… my new boss is a lunatic. As I picked up the closest thing to a pillow in my vicinity and handed it to the Doctor Professor, I admitted to myself that he was, at least, very good at being a lunatic. “One more thing, Doctor Professor.”
“What?” he asked, as he brushed away the chalk from the board using the pillow.
“Why do you call this place Utopsia?”
For the briefest of moments before he started laughing, he looked at me like I was the crazy one. Between guffaws and unsympathetic chortles, he managed to inform me of the following: “Utopsia (Hahahaaaa!) isn’t the name of (Kekekekekekeke) this place. It’s the name (BWAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAhehehe... hoo!) of science!” As much as I hated to admit it, it did improve that clichéd phrase quite a bit.
“Alright, is there anything else you need me to do?”
“No, you’re going to do everything I need you for today. You can leave.”
It was on that note that my first day of my new job ended, and I was allowed to go back to my dorm. I exited the lab, climbed the stairs, and headed outside. I paused before his office door and went back to check the picture. Sure enough, there was Doctor Professor F and two tiger cubs. There was an ancient sticky note nailed next to it that read ‘Guinea Pigs obtained.’ For a second, I looked at the picture again, expecting to see guinea pigs instead. When all I saw were striped kittens, my fear of tigers came back to me, and I swallowed hard as I cracked open the office door. The tigers were still there. They’re chained. I reminded myself with a deep breath. So just bolt out of here and maybe they won’t notice. I’ve never run so fast in my life. A few seconds later, back at the surface, I was accosted by my roommate, who had been waiting for me.
“So, what’s Professor F like? What’s down there? Did he kill you? Are you brainwashed? Does he actually have any tigers? Is he still human? Was he ever human?” If you’ve never had questions volleyed at you like this, it’s kind of like being put on hold. You know that even if you shout, the music isn’t going to stop, and so you plot the death of the composer or the corporation until it another human voice comes along. It took 2 minutes, before my roommate gave me space in which to answer.
Normally I kept track of all the questions and answered them in order. After the experience I had just gone through, however, I decided that only one thing needed to be said. “His name is Doctor Professor F.”
With a finally speechless companion, I took off for the nearest hospital to have my arm checked out. The clinic doctor told me that my arm was healing well, and that next time I should have this sort of thing checked out the day it happens, that way I can be sure it will heal properly. “You got awfully lucky it popped back on its own.” While arguing with him would’ve been easier than arguing with my employer, I was simply too drained to tell him that his medical degree meant nothing in the face of a madman who owned two tigers.
I went back to my dorm and flopped into bed. My roommate wasn’t there, which was normal considering it was only 1PM on a Monday. I closed my eyes and wondered what other miracles Doctor Professor F had created down there in his laboratory. I wondered how many advances in technology and knowledge he had happened upon amidst countless explosions. I wondered how he made walls out of Jell-O. I didn’t get out of bed the rest of the day, and when my alarm clock went off for my 8AM class, I got up and tried not to seem like I hadn’t gotten any sleep.
It was noon and I’d just slipped by the tigers for the third time in my life. Doctor Professor F wasn’t in his office, and a distant explosion told me that he hadn’t gone out shopping either. I headed downs to the lab, this time more conscious of the danger that darkness and staircases, when paired, present to the human body. At the bottom, I cautiously opened the doors and ducked just in time to avoid a splash of Jell-O. “Success!” followed shortly.
Everything inside had been moved and the Jell-O walls were a different color today. Once again, the mystery of how to make a wall out of gelatin came to the forefront of my brain, and I just had to ask. “P… Doctor Professor F?”
“What? Who is it?”
“It’s me, your assistant. Remember?”
Silence responded, and so I looked for him. “Profe-“
“That’s DOCTOR Professor F!” the Jell-O shouted at me. I scanned the walls and found the human-shaped hole quickly enough. “I’m not about to extort the Board of Directors for nothing!”
“Right, umm… how do you make these walls?”
“Aha!” He came tumbling out of the mass of purple and looked me dead in the eye. As fortune would have it, he wasn’t wearing anything. “Sleep!”
It sounded reasonable enough for the two seconds of wholly awkward silence that followed, but then reason got the upper-hand in my brain once more. I spun around and closed my eyes tightly, trying to rid my mind of what I’d just seen. “Sleep? How does that even work?” It was the only other thing on my mind, and therefore my only potential escape.
“Simple!” He didn’t sound at all phased by his own nudity. “I’ll head to sleep, and then, when I wake, you’ll have created a new one!”
Not being able to recall constructing two massive blocks of grape Jell-O any time within the past 24 hours, I couldn’t just let this slide. “Me? How could I do that? I didn’t do it!”
“Of course not! You’re going to.” He said.
His inability to listen to a word I said was getting on my nerves. I whirled around in anger, immediately recalled why I was facing the other direction, and kept right on spinning until I was facing the door again. “But… I don’t know how! How am I supposed to make one if I don’t know how?”
“I’m sure you’ll learn.” Doctor Professor F told me casually. “And I require you to hold these beakers!”
Very carefully I turned around, using my hand to block out the view of his lower body. As calmly as I could, I walked over to him, took the beakers, and stood there, staring up at the smoke as it went from grey to bright pink quite rapidly. Below my field of vision, Doctor Professor F was doing something that involved at least two more beakers, and a bit of mumbling. “Okay, Doctor Professor. I think you just don’t understand. You see, I don’t know h-“ an explosion cut me off. The force it takes to propel a body through 15 feet of open air and imbed it 5 feet into a slab of Jell-O is surprisingly disorienting. Somewhere behind all the ringing and gelatin in my ears I barely made out a muffled shout of joy.
As I began the slow process of reorientation, I felt only two emotions: rage and bewilderment. I couldn’t believe that Doctor Professor F hadn’t told me that something was going to explode. I couldn’t believe that he would risk our lives so carelessly all for Tapioca, or whatever he called it. I couldn’t believe that I expected anything else from him. Before I could go through with the rest of my thought process, I was pulled out of the purple and back into the lab.
“Ahh,” my employer commented to me as I composed myself, “Our last successful experiment!”
“We could’ve been killed!” His left eye twitched as he looked down at me. I didn’t care anymore, so I met his gaze. “Are you out of your mind?! What if that stuff had sent one of us into the nails or the doorway?! We’d be dead and I’d never graduate!” The more I spoke about potential pasts, the more his left eye twitched. The more his eye twitched, the angrier I became. The angrier I got, the more I had to say. “I have to run past tigers to get in here! I dislocated my arm yesterday and I was nearly fried as well! And it’s all because of you and your damned…!” I trailed off the moment he started backing away from me. He was looking at me like I was the naked scientist who had no sense of how time worked.
“Okay, kiddo… you need to calm down. You’re talking crazy talk.”
Through all of my rage, that little spark inside of me that told me Doctor Professor F was to be trusted clicked on and I felt a bit better. “No! I’m not talking crazy! You’re the crazy one!”
“Kiddo, I ain’t the one who doesn’t know how time works.” He told me all of this in the way you tell your youngest child that Santa isn’t real. I felt heartbroken and weak. All my anger was doing nothing, and I was beginning to think this escaped asylum patient knew more than I did. “Go home, kiddo. We’ll continue this when you leave next time.”
I shook my head and tried to pull myself together. A man who saw the sun less than the majority of angler fish was more composed than I was. “No, I think I’m fine.”
“No time for thinking!” he shouted, before hefting me over his shoulder. I immediately tried to kick my way out of his grasp, but lunacy comes with an unnatural amount of physical strength, apparently. “Utopsia can’t wait! And you’ll be an excellent snack!”
Tigers, once again, filled the bulk of my thought process as I realized we were heading up the stairs. “No! Wait! Professor! You can’t feed me to the tigers!”
“What tigers?” he demanded as he trotted up the stairs with me flailing over his shoulder.
“The… I mean… the guinea pigs! You can’t fe-“
He started laughing and I fell. My reflexes were far more prepared for stairs this time, and so I managed to stop myself before anything got seriously damaged. With a grunt, I pulled myself up and came face to face with a kneecap. My nose brushed against wrinkled skin and a smell that I can only describe as ‘grayish-blue’ made me head for the nearest wall as fast as humanly possible. My head hit concrete and the next thing I recall is waking up next to a stack of books with red spines. The Doctor Professor was nowhere to be seen, so I sat up and rubbed my head. “Ugh… I’m going to need a better healthcare package at this rate.” I shook my head and checked around.
I was certainly in the Doctor Professor’s office, but something was different. The book columns were all in place, the desk, the picture, everything was in place. Then, I saw it. The door was open and the tigers were gnawing on something grey and bloody. I jumped up and shut the door quickly before they could make an appetizer out of me and took a few more panicked breaths, just in case the first few hadn’t done their job. I decided it was best to go downstairs and see if Doctor Professor F needed me for anything else. After all, despite everything I was still his employee, at least until I could file my two week notice.
I took the stairs slowly in order to keep myself from a third major injury in two days of employment. Even construction workers didn’t get hurt this much, and they got to see the sun. Downstairs the lab was surprisingly lacking in explosions. I recall war veterans telling me stories about shelling become so frequent that they actually found silence more unnerving. This was my Grenada, since I obviously hadn’t been in it long enough to consider it something more historically important. “Doctor Professor F?” I called to the relative emptiness. Bubbling mucks answered me. “That’s odd.” I decided aloud, and went looking around a bit more.
The lab seemed more interesting the more of it I saw. I figured out that the Jell-O walls were actually made up of dozens of refrigerator-sized blocks. It took some of the magic out of them, but still didn’t quite explain how it all got there, and where the extra stuff went at the end of the day. The test tubes and beakers weren’t arranged in any particular order, as far as I could tell. The tops of the tables were of a far more interesting variety of colors than the undersides. As it turned out, the tables were made of some high-grade metal, as I really should have guessed, and there was barely a dent in the surface of any of them. Try as I might, I couldn’t find the source of either of the clouds of gas around the ceiling or the floor. It seemed like the more I found out, the more questions there were to ask. It was something like reading the Bible.
Having explored the great mysteries of the lab, I looked around again, expecting Doctor Professor F to just pop out of nowhere and start to work again. He didn’t. “Where in the world could he be?” I asked myself as I looked around the room one more time; I even ducked down to see if he was hiding from me. “Where could…” I took a sharp breath and dashed back upstairs. I ran past the book columns and nearly threw the door open in a panic. The tigers glanced up from their meal, fresh blood dripping off their chins and long bones scattered across the floor, gnawed clean. I slammed the door shut and sunk. He’d been eaten. Those damned tigers had eaten him! It was easy to panic in this sort of situation, and so panic I did.
I started pacing back and forth across the office, wondering how I was going to explain this to my family, and my friends, and the school board. “Oh God, does Doctor Professor F even have a family? Friends? Who do I bring in to identify the body? Why does this have to happen to me? To him? What did he ever do except blow things up?” while I ranted and questioned the air, I came to the realization that I was probably the closest thing to family Doctor Professor F had. I was, according to college legend, the only living person who’d seen him in 15 years. Of course, it wasn’t like I really believed in stupid college rumors, but tigers eating your employer can be quite jarring.
“Ok, I’ll just call the school counseling service or something. Or the police, and they’ll know what to do.” I reached for a cell phone and immediately recalled that I had forgotten to own one. I checked for an office phone, or something that resembled a phone in the office. There was nothing except the DOS computer, which I knew was about as much of a phone as those tigers were vegetarians. “Ok, so… I just run past them, like usual right? But, if they got the Doctor Professor then there’s no way I’ll be able to get past them. They’re probably off their chains.” That would be another problem, calling animal control for two renegade guinea pigs that would be eating half the campus. I stopped pacing. “Did I just call those tigers… guinea pigs?” I realized that this was probably a major problem as well, but something I could deal with later. “I’m just going to run for it.”
Determined now, I walked over to the door and took a deep breath. I grabbed the handle, pulled open the door, and came face-to-face with Doctor Professor F, holding a flamethrower and grinning in my direction. Something about the situation seemed familiar, but I was too shocked to recall exactly what it was. “Hellooo there Kiddooo!” he sang to me as he stood in the doorway, fortunately covered up by his weapon of choice.
“Doctor Professor F! You’re alive!” The obvious, for whatever reason, seems like the best thing to shout when you figure out someone is alive. It’s never something clever or profound, and if you don’t believe me you can ask Hollywood.
“I am?” He was just as surprised as I was. “Are you?”
I just nodded and stared as he waked past me, making sure to keep my gaze above the belt. It got harder to do the further away he got, and so I looked back at the tigers. The bones and the blood stains were still there. What had it been? What else in the world looked like a mutilated Doctor Professor F? “Doctor Professor,” he leaned backwards until he could see me, “What di- are you going to feed the ti - the guinea pigs?”
“Painted Zebra.” He nodded solemnly and saluted, still bending over backwards. “They’re going to be brave soldiers.”
I didn’t understand, I didn’t think I ever would, but I knew no one was going to explain it to me. Or, rather, no one was going to explain it to me in a way that didn’t make the situation more confusing. “So, is there anything else you need me to do, Doctor Professor?”
“Of course there is, Kiddo. We’re running low on,” he lowered his voice to a whisper, “Holy Lemon Juice. Go get a fresh batch.”
“Sure thing, Doctor Professor.” I didn’t know where I was going to get Holy Lemon Juice; I didn’t even know where I was going to get Holy Lemons, but I figured so long as Doctor Professor F didn’t lose any more screws, he was safe enough to stay around. Besides, what other job has that many relatively safe explosions? Perhaps Doctor Professor F and I don’t quite understand each other, and he’s taken more than a few therapy sessions to get used to, but, the truth is, if he was a normal guy I’d be out of a job and the Jell-O Corporation would see a significant drop in sales. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot of questionable things to commit myself to, in Utopsia!