Gataru - Prologue
Disclaimer
This is an experimental novel in progress. Every month, a new chapter will be released after 2 drafts, a pre-reader, and a final edited draft. However, the book is being published as it’s written, which means that as the story develops, I may get new ideas, and things may change along the way. There may be typos, mistakes, and inconsistencies. Where I think it’s relevant or clarifying, I’ll put notes in the chapters to inform readers of these changes, but I will leave the chapters up as they are (except for fixing typos) even as the story changes. The result will be a quasi-first draft of a novel that will likely go through another few stages of refinement and changes before the final version is released.
Feedback is welcome! See a glaring inconsistency that I didn’t address? Let me know. See typos or other errors, let me know (so I can fix them).
The prologue and Chapter 1 will be available for free; after that, each chapter will only be available to paid subscribers.
Prologue
Friday, March 18, 1994 Brooklyn, New York
Chester Kask didn’t love the pizza from Johnny’s, but he ate it because it was cheap and close. Johnny’s Original Brooklyn Pie was only two doors down from Chester’s apartment building, and he could be out and back in fifteen minutes with two slices and a Coke for five bucks. If he got a pie to share with his roommate, Ria, then they’d each only be out four-fifty and be up a two-liter to boot. But Ria was out for the night with her new girl-toy. Chester would have considered the full-pie deal anyway, but as middling as Johnny’s was fresh, it was rock bottom when it was cold or reheated. So, after a quick jog through the evening drizzle, two slices with everything went down without an overabundance of excitement as Chester flipped the channels on their second-hand, mid-80s TV. The picture wasn’t great, and, as news, public broadcasting, sports, and sitcoms offered themselves and were immediately rejected, Chester reflected that this was a good allegory for his life: sitting in a passable one-bedroom apartment he shared with a woman he wasn’t sleeping with, eating middle of the road pizza, watching uninspired programming on a dumpy TV.
He had never had delusions of grandeur or aspirations to greatness, but all the same, it felt like a heck of a let-down to be still living like this at the age of thirty. He flipped to one of the upper channels where, now and then, he’d catch a local access station broadcasting ridiculous interview shows, student films, and his favorite television show. Most of the time, Channel 70 offered the same snow as every other empty channel. But, now and then, he’d find Miss Lupe dressed like Elvira either interviewing local horror authors and filmmakers or hosting horror movie marathons. He liked Miss Lupe’s voice, her teased hair, and, if he was honest, her low-cut dresses and voluminous cleavage. In that department, Elvira had nothing on Miss Lupe.
To Chester’s delight, he didn’t find snow on Channel 70. Instead, Miss Lupe sat before him on an old easy chair she had draped in black cloth and was showing an especially generous amount of thigh tonight. Chester frowned appreciatively, munched apathetically, and listened intently as she talked about a student horror film she was about to show. Despite the unimpressiveness of everything else on this chilly Friday evening, he was happy.
Rain started drumming on the window, and Chester checked his watch. 7 PM. Was that the time when Miss Lupe came on Friday nights? He wasn’t sure. Usually, he’d be out with Ria at a friend’s apartment to drink and eat before they went out for the night. He had always thought the Lupe show started later, and it disappointed him that he might have missed hours of her broadcast. He decided to set up the VCR to tape Channel 70 next Friday to see how much he could catch.
Miss Lupe leaned forward, gave Chester an eyeful of the good stuff, winked, and purred out her catch phrase, “Let’s add some screams to your dreams!” Then she was gone, and a grainy movie took her place. The movie was shaky, and the picture quality told him it had been shot on video, not film. It started in a cemetery, and Chester wondered if it was a rip-off of Night of the Living Dead. He wasn’t a big zombie fan, but he figured on an uninspiring night like this one, a beggar could not be a chooser, especially not when Miss Lupe might be back after the short film was done.
He decided that if she was, and she took calls like she sometimes did, he would dial in. He would tell her how much of a fan he was. He wouldn’t say anything rude, not like some of the guys who called in. No, he would be polite and would tell her that he just thought the world of what she was doing.
So, he hunkered down to endure the amateur, shaky video of two people walking through a graveyard in the hopes of being able to brighten his evening by maybe brightening Miss Lupe’s, and, of course, actually getting to talk to her. For a moment, he let himself imagine a world in which she took a fancy to him, and they got a few drinks. And then … well, it was a silly idea, he knew. But he enjoyed the fantasy and laughed at himself as he pictured walking next to her while she was still dressed like the Mistress of the Night. He wondered if she’d lose some of her magic in a sweater and a pair of jeans.
It turned out that the student film wasn’t terrible. The actors weren’t nearly as lost or wooden as Chester had often seen in similar films. Instead, they had an easy rapport, and the script wasn’t half-bad either. It was too bad that the video was so messed up. Within the first minute, the image stopped once and lost resolution so badly that everything turned into little blocks. Three seconds later, the video returned, and the picture resolved on a close-up of a tall, willowy, Japanese actress—had Miss Lupe said she was Japanese? He thought she had. She was good. She was better than the man who was playing her boyfriend. She had a—shit, the block thing happened again. It reminded Chester of old arcade games, the way everything was made from little squares. Or, no, more like the games his little brother played at home on his Nechem-8.
The image fixed itself, and now the actress was standing in a bedroom, taking her T-shirt off. Suddenly, Chester was acutely aware of the fact that this was a college student film, and that college art students liked to be edgy. He wondered, suddenly, if Miss Lupe was about to get extra racy by showing a topless woman on her channel.
Chester had enough self-awareness to feel silly for being a thirty-year-old man excited that he might see a bare-chested woman on television. Yet, this self-awareness didn’t cool his jets. He sat up and rested his chin on the heel of his hand.
Fuck the world, he thought as she undid her bra, and the screen turned into a mosaic of blocks. It occurred to a calmer area of his mind that this might be on purpose, not to break any FCC rules. But the lonely, juvenile, horny part of his mind felt like he’d been robbed. He jumped up, stepped over the coffee table, and started adjusting the rabbit-ear antennas. Nothing changed on the screen. The blocks moved, and he could see … shit, were they making out? Holy shit, was this a full-on horror skin flick?
“God damn everything,” Chester said, trying six different antenna configurations in as many seconds. Then, when he thought he had moved the ears into every possible combination, the image resolved. There they were, in the full and vigorous throes of passion. Chester decided he had underestimated the chemistry between the two. Of course, he thought, if the man in the film had even a passing interest in women, he wouldn’t have to work very hard. Not with a woman as beautiful as—
Someone knocked on the door.
“Come … on …” Chester breathed. He almost ignored the knock. He could just pretend not to be home. But then the woman on the screen moaned, and the person knocked again. Defeated, Chester punched the power button with only the minor consolation that the screen had degenerated back into the blocks again.
Rolling his eyes at his stupid life, Chester went to the door and opened it.
He didn’t scream because he didn’t understand what he was seeing. The person who stood in front of him was wearing Ria’s clothes. He recognized her blue T-shirt with “Soda Pop Samurai” silk-screened on the front. They were an infinitesimally local band, and he’d never seen anyone else sporting their swag. But the person didn’t have Ria’s face. They didn’t really have any face at all. Instead, there was only a complication of squares, like the ones on TV. Reflexively, he counted them. There were twenty-five in total: five columns and five rows. The second and fourth squares in the second row from the top were brown. Brown like Ria’s eyes were brown. For a second, they turned the same shade as the blocks around them, a dark tan. Then they were brown again.
Like it’s blinking, Chester thought.
Behind the person with Ria’s body, Ria’s shirt, and the strange, blocky face, the world went fuzzy. No, not fuzzy—flat. All the details blended until a solid beige wall stood behind strange Ria.
Then, as his mind told him it was time to scream, the thing with Ria’s shirt and the uncanny, blinking face raised a brick in one hand and brought it down onto Chester’s nose.