Hell of a Rig

Mom and I sat in the living room to eat the pizza. Pizza is not really a family dinner food. Pizza demands to be eaten while you watch a movie or something. But we aren’t really a TV family. I mean we have a TV… somewhere. I hooked the PS4 up to it so that mom could watch Netflix. But mom watches Netflix while she knits, reads a book, and listens to political podcasts. You can’t really add a piece of pizza to that.

Instead we sat together in the living room, mom had her phone out and was trying to find something interesting to put on the speaker. She said something along the lines of “Hmm?” And I head “372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back” for the first time.

Okay, you know Mystery Science Theater 3000? Well Mike Nelson went away from that project and made Rifftrax, which is the same thing, but with some recent movies and no puppets. You buy a track and sync it up to the DVD. It’s was a serious pain in the beginning, but now they have software you can get for your laptop. You just have to have a legit copy of the movie, and with Redbox, that’s not hard.

Well one of the guys who writes for Rifftrax, Connor Lastowka suggested to Mike that they should read “Ready Player One” together and make a podcast book club of their thoughts.

Their thoughts were that it was a book they expected to hate before they started reading it, and they were right. Then they talked about what was wrong with it in great detail, chapter by chapter, for 8 episodes.

We finished the first episode while mom ate her couple of pieces of pizza. She started the second episode while I was working on my last piece, which was also the last piece of pizza. My tail was out of space, and I sat forward in my chair so I could bring it around and lay it in my lap.

Mom knit and didn’t notice my tail. Mike and Connor talked about “Hell of a rig” which is an “in” joke five layers deep. I got my tail to wrap around my wrist finally.

The episode finished and mom was getting ready to queue another one when I said, “Can we talk for a little bit?”

Mom set her phone down, and laid her knitting to the side. She wasn’t fooling me, she still had the yarn wrapped around her fingers for a continental stitch. But she would give me her attention until the conversation allowed her to knit again.

But she didn’t say anything, so I filled in the gaps, “Did you ever wonder about the accident?”

“Are we talking about the accident now?”

“Um… sure? Why?”

“You’ve avoided even mentioning it for two months.”

Had I? Great, my tail was bushing up. Not a whole lot, but it was noticeably thicker. And I could feel the hairs standing on end, I realized as I watched it. The more conscious of my tail I became the more I could feel it. “I didn’t know I was avoiding it.”

“Yes dear. That’s how avoidance works.”

“Okay, well … Well I know some stuff about how it happened. Stuff that you won’t believe.”

“Would you like to tell me anyway?”

Would I? I would not. I went over my relationship with my mother, and her role in the accident’s aftermath and tried to puzzle out if knowledge of Mr. Glome would help things. Or if, as my protector, she would see Mr. Glome as a threat. Or if she’d invite him over for dinner and conversation. Maybe she’d knit him a pair of socks he couldn’t wear. “How ‘bout if you just take some things on faith? Things that I’m trying to figure out on my own.”

“The girl who didn’t remember to text me for four hours is figuring it out on her own?”

“Okay, ouch. I’m more responsible than you think, mom.”

“Dear heart, if you were twice as responsible as I thought you were, you’d still be half way to where you need to be.” I felt my face flush in shock and outrage and she reached out and put her hand on my knee. “And that’s okay, child. You don’t have to be an adult. It’s okay to try your hardest at your age, and it’s okay to fail sometimes. I’m sorry and I forgot that. You—you have a tail.”

Oh good, right in the middle of that is when she noticed. I waggled the tip. It took furrowing my brow and a lot of concentration. The middle of the tail disappeared when I did it, from the center out.

Mom withdrew her hand, picked up her knitting, and knocked out three rows while she stared at the tail coiled on my lap.

“Okay, read the whole thing again,” Mom took a sip of her wine.

I got to the bullet point, “Ask yourself: has pizzagate really been debunked,” before she snorted wine into her nose. It was a Tuesday night, we’d had a fight, now mom was on her second glass of wine while I explained Q to her.

“Is he asking if it was proven that the pizza parlor wasn’t hold child orgies in their basement?”

“Well the question is ludicrous on its face, mom. Comet Ping Pong doesn’t have a basement.”

“You know I’ve worked with the LCHT as part of their outreach program,” Mom said. “I had never heard the word ‘pizza’ as a code for child. I mean, they do use codes of course. Mostly they’re Disney princesses.”

“Oh, ew.” A thought occurred, “Wait does that mean—?”

“Yes dear, you would be an Ariel.” I tried to get the look of horror to shift off my face and couldn’t, “Oh don’t worry dear, the demand for gingers is just about zero.”

“That does wonders for my self esteem mom. I’m untrafficable.”

She put down her wine glass, “Dear heart I’m trying to tell if you’re really offended.”

I put it out of my head, “We’re getting off topic. The topic is that President Trump, who was accused by sixteen women of sexual assault, including the rape of a thirteen year old girl; who got out of the draft with his bone spurs; was asked by the military to run for president, in order to clean up the Satan worshiping pedophiles who had become the ‘deep state.’ And any day now he’s going to round them all up and try them in military tribunals, and then they’ll all be hanged to taken to gitmo.”

“Did the Satan worshiping pedophiles do nine-eleven?” Mom asked.

“They did everything. Nine-eleven, Oklahoma city, Las Vegas, Katrina—”

“They caused the hurricane?”

“They have weather weapons, mom. They used them to hit New Orleans, and then screwed up the governments response so that even more people would die.”

“Sure. Why?”

“Because New Orleans being hit with a bad hurricane controls people somehow.”

“Dear heart?”

“Yeah mom?” I put my hand in her across the kitchen table.

“This is going to get someone killed isn’t it?”

“It’s a dead certainty, mom.”

“That was cleansing,” she finished off her wine and stood, “are we both ready to talk about the tail?”

“And this thing was in my house?” Mom clutched the ice cream spoon like it was a frozen weapon, fury in her eyes.

“It’s fine mom. He’s fine. It’s? No, he. He said I should call him mister Glome. Though that’s probably just a callback and not based on anatomy. Anyway, there isn’t anything you could do to keep him out. Our walls are as meaningful a barrier to him as masking tape on the floor.”

She reached out, “Can I…”

“I’d really prefer you didn’t touch it. Everyone touched it today and it kind creeps me out.”

“Okay, dear heart. I won’t touch your tail.”

Only that made me feel kinda bad, so I said, “You can touch it, just later. And please, please don’t just touch it without telling me.” I rearranged my legs on her bed and scooped more chocolate ice cream out of the tub.

“Why?”

“It makes me feel like a pet, and I don’t like that.”

Mom took a scoop of ice cream, “What if you forget to keep it hidden?”

I smiled and dribbled chocolate ice cream down my chin. Then I went to wipe my face and the dribble fell down my chest. The shock that I had boobs was with me again for a second, and then it seemed trivial in the face of all the other bodily changes I had gone through. Mom handed me a Kleenex from the bedside table and I talked while I mopped out my cleavage. “We have a plan for that. The problem is actually going to be keeping it in 3 dimensions all the time. I’m getting better with it though. It feels half-natural, half like learning to use a new limb.”

“What’s the plan?”

“I just wear a headband with a cable taped to it.”

“Why. It’s so simple Aisling. Clearly anyone could have thought of it.”

“Sarcasm doesn’t become you, mom.”

“It’s how your became, dear heart. I was sarcastic while you were conceived.”

Dammit, she did it again. “I’ll just tell everyone it’s an ee-ee-gee.” Mom only raised an eyebrow and licked her ice cream spoon. “They make like, cat ears, and video games, and pretty soon prosthetics with them. You can go online, and if you have sixty bucks and are any good at soldering you can make your own from plans you can download. It just registers your electrical activity in your brain and translates that into set patterns of motion. So you get cat ears that move from the electrical signals in your brain!”

“And you plan to just pass your tail off as some kind of art-science project?”

I took another scoop of ice cream, “Yep.”

Mom was deep in thought for the next few ice creams and finally said, “It should be fairly easy to remove though…”

“Mom, I’d rather not.”

“But the teasing—”

“If the teasing gets bad I can just hide it. I don’t really want medical science poking around in this thing, considering my medical history.”

“It’s getting close to that time. We can start talking hormone blockers…”

“I’m not thinking about that at all mom.”

We had killed the ice cream, and with it the mood. There was still a general air of “hanging out” but also “bedtime”. Mom put the lid on the empty jug, and jerked in alarm as I clambered off the bed and brushed her with my tail.

I stood up and let it straighten out, “What do you think?”

“I think it’s one hell of a rig, Chuck.”

I laughed as I recognized her reference to the classic podcast 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back from the 80s (2017). It was one of my favorite podcasts and I had memorized every line. In that I had started listening to it 3 hours previous and wanted to listen to more of it.