Raskol and the Rascal
I drug my backpack behind me as I entered the lab. Dr. Landon was ready and waiting, looking like a man ten hangovers in at once. He was not, in fact, ten hangovers in at once. His scraggly appearance was just the collateral of his newest project.
“We’re at the precipice of the future, young protege!” he declared when he saw me. “Two years of work has finally paid off. With this new invention we’ll be able to extract fictional characters from any literary setting. Name a novel, name a context, name a name, and bam, we’ll pull ’em right out and plop ’em down on these great linoleum floors.”
The fiction-to-reality converter was, in essence, a glorified box. It was simplistic and metal, vastly anticlimactic. But for one who knew its uses, the possibilities were endless. All you’d have to do was crack the book of choice open, place it inside the box, zero the scanner in on a name or image, and the converter would do the rest. Analytics was nothing. Dr. Landon was a genius and he’d already resolved the intricacies.
“How does it work?” I asked.
“Science!” he yelled.
“No, I mean, what’s the process behind quantifying something fictional? What brand of quantum physics allows for a—”
“Science!” he yelled.
And that was good enough for me.
I drew my book of choice from the gaping mouth of my backpack. “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Where my classmates had endured such a book, I actually quite enjoyed it. Among my favorite characters was the main boi Raskolnikov. Murderer as he was, I was fairly intrigued by his ideas and mullings. That’s right! For the first fiction-to-reality conversion, I chose a fictional murderer. What could go wrong?
Upon inserting the book, I shut the door of the contraption and Dr. Landon switched it on, monitoring the process carefully. Like a printer, it scanned the pages, honed in on Raskol’s name and something started churning. A strand of light wormed its way down from the projector attached to the box’s righthand side. Soon, the projector threw forth a full-blown cast of light, and in that curious womb germinated the hintings of some spectral being. Slowly, he materialized. He was standing upright, eyes empty of thought. That came later. As he stepped from the bluish pocket, the lab’s white flushmounts caught him and then I could see. It had worked! I...think? I had to ask myself—did I know for certain what Raskol even looked like?
“Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov!” I cried, for the sake of insurance.
“Where am I!” he cried back.
I took that as a yes.
“Really?” Dr. Landon sighed with a great sense of defeat. “Him?”
“Hey, at least I didn’t materialize Alex DeLarge,” I retorted.
“You’ve never read A Clockwork Orange in your life.”
“No, but I’ve seen parts of the movie.”
“Where am I!” Raskol was now flipping out. Perhaps it was the modernity of our stark-white lab hitting him like a sledgehammer to the gut.
“Hide your sharp objects,” Dr. Landon muttered. “Especially the axe.”
“We have no axe,” I replied.
“Well, materialize an axe and then hide it.”
Logic! Dr. Landon did not like to be wrong.
“This is getting kinda’ mean. I’m gonna’ explain things to him,” I volunteered.
“Good luck with that,” Dr. Landon dismissed. “He’s your problem. I’m gonna’ go fetch my Superman comics. And maybe materialize a character who hasn’t killed anyone.”
“Zod.” I reminded.
“That’s not canon!” the doctor cried, indignantly.
“If you say so...”
*****
After unloading my spiel to the frantic Raskol, he calmed down. Said the last thing he remembered was passing a tavern where some most “unceremonious” language was wafting out. In other words they were cussin’ a blue streak.
“Well, you should feel right at home here then,” I replied. “Unfortunately, modern day’s pretty much the same.”
Upon the conclusion of our bizarre heart-to-heart, he asked if we had any card games around to pass the time. So I took him up on his enthusiasm and brandished my Uno deck. I never left home without it.
Halfway in, I was miles ahead, and he apparently found this irritating enough to accuse me of cheating. All the while Dr. Landon was scurrying to and fro in the background, hauling in armful after armful of novels, comics, and magazines. All I knew was he had better keep his naughty mags out of the converter. It’s a shame when a 17-year-old has to uphold the decorum in a scientific partnership as this.
“Stop!” Raskol demanded, checking behind him for reflective surfaces. “You’re spying on me. I know it. You predict my hand much too well.”
“Hard to cheat at Uno,” I retorted. “But you’re forgiven since yer still learning the ropes. It’s all in the deck, man. All in the deck.”
“You shuffle it purposely then,” he theorized. “You know what cards are where.”
By then, Dr. Landon had everything from Tarzan to James Bond to the Joker running around. And he’d been cross with me for picking Raskol.
Honestly, though, I was starting to see it. What an ill-temper on this one. He was kind of a sore loser. Not my fault he was so unversed in the art of Uno.
“Curse these modern games!” he finally declared, flinging his deck down in a flare of annoyance and storming out.
Whenever he returned I decided to ignore his outburst and opt for optimism. My decision was only squelched when he reappeared in the doorframe, a rusty axe in his hands.
Uhhh...maybe I’d picked a little too early in the novel to extract him.
He was, perhaps, stuck in some kind of “nothing left to lose” phase. As he chased me around the lab floor, I hoped this phase passed quickly. What an idea this was! Tarzan was now strangling the Joker, negating the longsuffering mercies of Batman. Superman glided through the air above, crashing through walls, searching for his bearings. A bunch of Vegas showgirls giggled demurely in the corner, surrounding a euphoric Dr. Landon.
Why was I not surprised.
Still, with every dodge of Raskol’s axe, I figured I had bigger things to worry about.
#fiction, #strictlyfiction, #don’ttrythisathome