Stuff to See!
Zenopan's Tales of Eerie Stuff
Introduction
The Story
Dateline: May 18, 2035
The local newspapers covered every infinitesimal detail of the strange murder. They laid out the list of the poor physicist's equally poor wife's psychological problems, which included screaming "Help me, I'm drowning in milk" and "Damn mandrill" in the middle of the night. She would also quote verbatim the revolutionary "Theory of Everything Made Simply" (known to the masses as TEMS), which made Zenon a very rich man indeed, long before his death. According to the eminent psychologist Sigmund Freud, her problems stemmed from an untimely attack on her son Dino, who was two at the time, 21 years ago by a savage mandrill. When the mandrill was later adopted as the family pet, she was no happier.
Obituaries, which repeated misspelled Zenon's name, hailed him as the greatest scientist ever for his publication of TEMS, which supplanted the rickety Grand Unified Field theory, which held that some odd subnuclear forces were united at the exact moment of the Big Bang or some such shlock. TEMS, on the other hand, held much more water by asserting, of course, that no one truly exists. This revolutionized the fields of physics and warfare, since controllable nuclear fusion was attained at last, with only the loss of Western Europe.
His wife, a native of what was once France, was, for some unfathomable reason shocked at that turn of events. At that point, according to Dr Freud, she went "completely bonkers".
The will, which reunited the Pantazonis clan, was rather unorthodox. Aside from being written in invisible ink by the light of a ghetto moon, the will left to Zenon's son Dino a farmhouse on 1800 acres of land in Antarctica, a Rolls Royce, something called "The Terminator", and, of course, the mandrill, whose name was Moonlight. To his 18 year old daughter Rebecca, he left the family fortune (some 200 trillion dollars), and all of his journals, to help her in her study of physics. Dino was unhappy about the terms, feeling like his father held an unjust bias against the humanities (for Dino taught History to underprivileged high school students), which he did. Cursing, he stormed from the premises, fired up the Rolls Royce, and nearly killed poor Moonlight, whom he threw savagely into the trunk.
After reaching the icy wastes of his new home, Dino's mood finally started to soften...until he saw a dead fruit bat hanging in the corner of the living room, after which he flew into the stock diatribes of his youth, reviling his father, cursing his ill luck, and drinking malt liquor with relish. In the course of his drunken wanderings, he found Moonlight poring over a copy of Zenopan's Tales of Eerie Stuff, a popular series of pulp fiction. Scrawled upon a desk at Moonlight's left hand was a note which read "I want my MTV".
Case Study #37298
A young man came to my office, asking for a psychoanalysis not of himself, but of his pet mandrill Moonlight. The mandrill was quite unusual in that he used the languages of men and smoked the finest cigars I had, coated with cocaine. He also had an unreasoning fear of guns. I began the study with an exploration into the subject's childhood, which included the mauling of a young boy, now the mandrill's master. The seminal experience of his life was his capture at the hands of hunters in darkest Africa and his subsequent castration by shotgun in the United States. But Moonlight was unmoved by the grisly events he related to me, becoming only more excited when he told me of his time at Princeton, and his studies in philosophy. He further claimed that the marvel of Western Civilzation, the Pantazonis 'Theory of Everything Made Simple', was an absolute crock of horse shit, and that only a fool could possibly believe anything about it. At this point, Moonlight's master (a man named Dino, son of the great scientist), told me that he was an expert ventriloquist, but that he had nothing to do with the beast's sudden speech. Of course, I immediately dismissed the whole affair as the ramblings of a bright man with a diseased mind, distraught over the death of his father, and the imprisonment of his mother, whom Dino openly admired.Becky
How very weird it was to her. Her father's journals said nothing of the great man she expected to find. Rather, there were a reat many detailed sketches of the primate brain, and a variety of...interesting theories about how it worked. Eventually, Becky read something about the Transfer Process, a means of imprinting humanoid brain engrams onto a lower primate, such as a mandrill. She decided that she had to see her brother, where there was little love lost on either side.Dino
It was amazing. The mandrill appeared to be the reembodied spirit of his now dead father, complete in every detail and with even a passing physical resemblance. As he smoked his third crack pipe, he was in the middle of a rewarding conversation about TEMS and where people should stuff it, when in from the cold wastes stepped...Rebecca. It was amazing, Dino thought, that even the immortal Antarctic cold could not disturb a lock of hair on her head.
"Daddy?"
"Yes, Rebecca, it's me," replied Moonlight.
"I read all about the Transfer Process. You are SUCH a genius."
"I know."
But for Dino...this was just it. His sister had hogged up his father for as long as he could remember, and now, he decided things finally had to change. Dino went for daddy's shotgun...
And Moonlight jumped out the window.
Case Study #37299
In Hell, Sigmund Freud spoke to Satan: "Dino Pantazonis came again to me after some disturbing events in his life, lamenting the loss of his pet mandrill and his sister's recent murder. He was clearly acting to get the attention of his father, now dead, who had ignored him "forever". But the means he chose, in a moment of passion, was ultimately self-defeating, since the mandrill died of exposure to the bitter cold of Antarctica. He was too dependent on his mother...who had also been a victim of ignorance. I went to call the police------and the Earth went up in smoke around me."
Satan held a copy of TEMS, laughing hysterically.