The Man Card

Drunk Dentist, Chestmaster and Tommy were all drinking because it is a favorite pastime of the surgeon. The Chestmaster did not want to join them at first but they said they would only listen to his glory days in the Russian Federation if he took a swig because American bottles are often filled in thirds. 

Mahdav began to twirl his cup, “What are you working on, Tommy?” 

I had to admit that a new form of pornography had come to my office, a challenge so exciting that I could not date or even see my impossible children. This new lover had so surrounded me that the bills were stacking up with the dishes. Even the dog was getting very fat because he would not stop to help but only wanted to take walks and talk about other doggies. 

“Yes,” says Iliad, the Chestmaster. “I have found this passion and it ruined my life.” 

He is speaking of his former wife because he might have put her in the ground earlier, not gotten married altogether, and become the first Champion from Ecuador to be called a true prodigy. Iliad speaks slowly while sober and the Tequila we give him does not make him get to any particular point much faster. 

Drunk Dentist is in love with my teeth and wants to hear all about it while he considers the root extractions and how to turn ocean stones to go with the saliva tides. The man is a miracle surgeon but I don’t want to be this intimate with him at that time. 

Mahdav puts his hand in the air and swears that he will help me overcome this new addiction. "Obsessions are all fine and dandy until someone gets locked in a house that is burning because they can’t put down the video game." He shows us his scars from the time he won a magnificent round of Call of Duty. 

We all understand. 

“So what is this thing? How has she woo’d you to a halfling?” 

I hate the way these guys translate in their heads sometimes. Mahdav is a world traveler and probably dreams in English but Iliad is not able to come out of his room much. Also, their French is atrocious. 

The map is pulled out and the men step back because they don’t want to spill mid-grade tequila on my baby, who is very new to this world. Iliad is quick with the maths, “Six hundred… nineteen. This has no immediately divisible multiplier. I think you should give up man.”

He takes another shot. 

Now the Drunk Dentist is very solemn and has only to look over the long scroll for a few minutes and then takes a step back and away. “This is not good.” 

I smile. 

“Maybe you know about this?” 

He points to the four-foot scroll which comes from tabloid-size pages taped together, a grid is made to identify the characters and there are references to the possible variations. Mahdav is a tattle tale and says, “He is trying to marry Happana.” 

There is silence. 

Iliad gently asks, “Who is Happana?” 

Mahdav slices his words with anger, “She is the ugliest Princess we have left from the old world. Her face is so hideous that she must ride on a unicorn and trick people into being her friend. Her lineage didn’t get the Macedonian influence because they would not lay down with Greek men but quietly kept interbreeding until they almost don’t have any teeth left. They just suck on their vittles, like this…” 

Mahdav made the motion of a snake sucking on an egg and we understood he has no time for people who don’t appreciate their teeth. 

“Why would you do this, Tommy? It’s like purposely buying all the government nuclear waste on sale and ruining your own property.”

He was beginning to sober up until I asked, “What would you guys do with a million million dollars?”

Iliad reminded us that rupees are on a true penny standard while half the world is at the dollar. 

“A trillion? It’s not a trillion my friend, you misread the ad.” 

Mahdav quickly takes out his phone and shows us the invitation from the High Command to translate the Indus Valley Script and receive a million dollars (U.S.)

I was undeterred. 

“Now read the fine print.” 

He scrolls to the end of the contract, zooms up the phone so he can read six-point font, and says, “The winning person shall marry the Princess Happana, take her to the castle, make at least one heir, and manage the Indus for the rest of their natural life.” 

“Dude! That’s the waterway between everything. “ 

I know. 

The Drunk Dentist starts thinking about what it would be like to rule the land from Pakistan to the Tibetian Slope. How he could reunite the ancient people who all have large missiles pointed at each other. There would be millions of thousands of teeth to grind. 

Iliad wants to do the maths and we leave him with a globe for a time as we go back to the corpus I am creating. I show Mahdav that there are variants of ideographs and it so resembles the trouble we had with Mayan. It takes just a few scribes with bad handwriting to make a language die faster than cancer. 

“There’s around 400 characters if you don’t use the variants.” 

It was still too much. 

“You see this character right here? 22 variants and they begin to take on elements that look like other glyphs. I know you’re going to say ‘modifiers’ but we find these in all the major parts of speech. They don’t even make sense if you have a clay pot with a buffalo but the buffalo has the signs used by a horse. 

“How many?” 

“Over 4,000 shards found but they are currently mutually independent. There are no third-party Steele or Rosetta Stones so we are having to trace out the minutiae by hand just to get the right glossary. “ 

Mahdav knows how hard it is to translate from ancient scripts which mix word-to-symbols and word-to-sounds, it’s like the worst case of ancient graffiti. We are going to have to get more drunk and expand our emotional intelligences. 

Iliad thinks his precious body cannot handle the more drunk or the meat or even chocolates. His body is a temple due to the last bout of some heart attack and he fears very much the facial strokes because his smile is like sunshine. 

This man, this Chest Master takes out his yogurt oats and vegetables he lets decompose in the refrigerator and starts eating from the garbage bag with rinds. “I tell you, this is a case for great minds. Have you tried AI?”

We stop. 

“What did you say?” 

Iliad slops in his curds and sounds like he is making love to the yogurt bag with his ingensional moaning. It is very distracting and usually, I have to put on my yellow blue tooth earbuds at full volume. He tries to avoid a burp before speaking because the man believes a burp can also give him a facial stroke. “I s–aya to you, have you tried AI?” 

The dentist and I slap each other right in the jaws, open palm, because we like to see what is stuck there. 

*

The ride to Kokenlapur was very calming, and relaxed by our individual ways in which we all found Diplomatic Pouches and could bring a few items of interest through the normal custom process. I think Iliad brought his probiotics, the Dentist brought a foldable 3d printer to donate veneers, and I snuck in a little pre-fertilized egg in a cryo capsule so that the princess wouldn’t know any better. 

There was a great celebration and all the people of the immediate neighboring countries came out, and threw some Paprika in the air with sugar flakes, just like it was Dawali. There were elephants who had been trained to stand on their hind legs and belly dance. The acting ruler took out his curved sword and chopped off both his arms and gave them to the three of us and said, “Which one of you chooses my daughter?” 

This was not part of the plan since I was the only one who had a capsule of human-grade en-vitro ready. Iliad could not be a husband again because he would get the heart pain and die. Drunk Dentist hadn’t been laid in some time because he was always drinking. He gave me one of those “If I have to I have to” looks like he would take one for the team. I was astounded. I punched his shoulder. “You told me she was exceedingly ugly and is the reason the Greeks wrote about Medusa.” 

He shrugs. 

“Now did you come here for the sex or the money?” 

It made sense that he could bed her because we understood whoever touched her first would surely die. This is the way that royals keep their money in the family. It was very similar to that play by Machiavelli called La Mandragola (The Mandrake Root). 

The Princess came out to the temple steps and the whole of the ancient language came down in scrolls, with necessary variations, a syntax agreed upon by major scholars, and the clay tablets which the kingdom wanted to be deciphered. They kept the princess encased in a white statue with a small air hole about her mouth. They said she was too brilliant for commoners to look upon and that only her husband could use the hammer and chisel to break her seal. 

It was a very ecumenical ceremony.

Of course, I wanted to be the ruler in name and multiply the natural wealth of the valley. Mahdav was going to be my stand-in for the fornication because he was very horny. It helps if you drink enough also. 

We were all ready to reunite the ancient peoples, to make the INDO in indo-european language take a seat above the Westerners and probably show how Atlantis is on the west side of the subcontinent, while the Amazonian Women tribe comes from near the Ganges, we expected the true information for how the Pyramids of Giza were created by Indus Giants. After all the King’s List said that we had mastered the life force and could live for 23 million years as one family. 

They had to get some eunuchs to hold the tablets as Happana’s father no longer had arms. We held these to the sides of our bodies ready to salute talking rhinocerouses and praise the 18 gauge train set. 

“My people, We shall read the TAblet of Destiny…” 

This was the moment we were all waiting for but Iliad was calculating the clouds and whimpering that Artificial Intelligence has the maxim, “Garbage in Garbage out.” 

The chanting began. Mostly it was the people singing in low moans, Kubayai, mono hito hawaaaaaa.” There was an instrument that looked like a didgeridoo, a long smoker’s pipe, and the sound that came out could stir all the mountains from their rest. This was the true cradle of civilization. 

My new father kept muttering the words we had translated and then the earth broke. It broke right there and the temple housing split like an egg, a golden orb rising slowly….

He paused and drank some nannari, kept muttering the language found on the Tablet of Destiny, and kept his eyes on the horizon. He didn’t even stop when the next temple complex also split like an egg some two miles in the distance. 

All the people stopped to watch, though usually a long royal marriage is accompanied by a game of blindfold orgy, to give the commoners a chance to beleive they are part of the royal succession. They don’t have much. 

One must remember that essentially the Indus is a valley despite the same name as a river. That is to say, it is sunken compared to the immediate topography. We were way past the era of Linear A or B and had solidly ruined the 'Out of Africa' belief, and 193 of all Neanderthals are found in Israel. We had made the wild wheat of the Steppe seem juvenile compared to our predated findings. We had reduced Mesopotamian lore to essentially a small oasis on the pilgrimage to chase the sun. Jericho was an infant. Ur’s ziggurat was only a sand castle…

Iliad starts pointing as the giant erupts from the deep. The dentist is checking his breath because he also likes to smoke on the sides and rubs some jasmine under his pits. The Chest Master starts muttering thus: 

“And set a watch upon her, great and strong Argus, who with four eyes looks every way. And the goddess stirred in him unwearying strength: sleep never fell upon his eyes; but he kept to sure to watch,, always.”

I have to hit Iliad with a newspaper because it looks like he is in a trance as the Lord of Cows rises from the bottoms and comes to a height that makes the Himalayan range look like footstools. The people scatter and the statue of the princess falls on its side. 

“Look, I don’t want to tell you guys how bad this is if this giant ruins the recommended borders of this land. How will we charge tariffs?” 

Iliad calculates, “Argos was not slain by Hermes.” He makes the supposition that the Indians have been fascinated with cows for so long because Argos is the guardian of the cow!

Whoa. That was huge. 

“Yes you see, I had to commit all of the ancient stories to this brain before I was married…” 

We don’t have time to listen to Iliad recreate the memory of his bondage when he truly loved Chest and how his woman saddled him with the necessary elements of earning. He is very long-winded when a memory is coming. 

We began to run. 

Just then, the alabaster statue of the princess Happana began to shatter. I had to stop like Lot’s wife because I was very curious if she was too ugly even for the Dentist. It was not what I expected because she only needed some foundation make-up for the warts and I didn’t care if everyone was going to look at her boobs because brassiers weren’t invented for a long time. 

“Hey Dentist…” we ran… “I think I changed my mind.” 

This is when the Dentist went searching in my pockets to rip up my Man Card. The goddess Hera also known to locals as Happana was beginning to tame her beast and this Giant didn’t actually have 100 eyes but appeared like 4 suns in the sky. He took the princess on his shoulder and they began to walk toward China because there was some anger over disputed land in the East. 

The Dentist tried to rip my Man Card with his teeth then his gums were bleeding. He looked down and noticed that I had laminated the Man Card back in the days when there was a Kinko’s copy and everyone was encouraged to protect official documents. 

“You can’t just go and change your mind. That is not very manly.” 

 I know. 

I told the Dentist to use his Zippo lighter to take away my 17 percent stipend and burn up my Man Card. He did. The power began to remove itself from my body, I felt the cold winds and suddenly feared that the Giant might step on me and my friends. It was shivering. 

But alas, we could no longer hear the Giant Argos walking east to destroy China. Happana was walking back with most of the dust from the giant’s fall covering her face. She resembled a kabuki actress, or a person with an allergy to light who might live in North England. She was very attractive to me in that albino sort of way and didn’t even stop to say hello to the Dentist who was giving her the ancient salutations and was still very horny. 

“Tommi.” 

“Yes, Happana? Or should I call you Herra?” (wink wink). 

Happana took a disk out of her toga and handed it to me as said we were wed. I tried to figure out what tag she gave me, could I exchange it for Bitcoin? What was the meaning of this bride’s price? 

As I rubbed off the fish scales, which is an ancient form of aluminum paste over lottery tickets, I saw the beginning of the Indus Alphabet and the end. 

She gave me a God Card and made me timelessly happy. 

Now I can’t even go out for the morning paper without some peasant trying to lay down and cover my feet. It is a difficult pleasure and I must never stray because Happana found the cryo tube filled with the pre-fertilized egg. She says that if I ever stray she will impregnate a swamp mosquito with little Tommy’s and that people will try to hit me and squash my babies till the end of time. 

(The End?)