WHEEMS: How do you mean?

  WELLWORTH: Well, you look back at what America was like for the first ten or twenty years of the twentieth century, you’re looking at a country that could barely hold itself together. National identity had nothing that it could cohere around. Americans all came from different countries, they spoke different languages, had different politics, different religions, and they came from different races, different classes. It turned out that the one thing, the only thing, that they could all agree on was, they all liked the same vaudeville songs on the radio; they all liked reading Flatfoot Floyd and drinking Coca-Cola. They liked Dickey Dog cartoons, and they liked Thunderman. Popular culture is the only glue that holds America together, and I guess that’s why it all needs stealing from the people who created it, and gifting to some big, trustworthy corporation with capitalism’s best interests at heart, and who’ll guard these valuable properties more closely than some writer or some artist with their crazy ideas and their crazy politics. You wouldn’t want these national assets to be in the hands of radicals, or black people, or women – not unless they were already corporate mutants such as Mimi Drucker or whatever it is that Gene Pullman’s meant to be, where the class and race and gender stuff is no big deal next to the tentacles and Cyclops eye. Or that’s my theory, anyway.

  WHEEMS: Denny, this stuff is great, better than anything I could have hoped for, but I’m getting conscious of how long I’ve kept you talking, and I’m thinking I should wrap this up. Is one more question OK?

  WELLWORTH: Sure. And don’t be so apologetic. I know I look dreadful so you can’t tell, but I’m having fun with all these questions. Ask away.

  WHEEMS: Well, as you were saying earlier, you’ve worked at both of the big companies. How do they compare with each other? Do you have any preferences?

  WELLWORTH: No, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think I have a preference. I think they’re both equally diabolical, but diabolical in different ways. With Massive, it’s just no-nonsense industrial brutality, police-state atmospherics and the rule of fear – your basic ‘Human Tank’s boot stamping on a human face forever’ deal. (LAUGHS) But at American, for my money, it’s not so thuggish and authoritarian, but it’s much creepier. If Massive is like a Victorian workhouse, then American is more like a late Roman mystery cult. You’ve seen the Ambrose Bell they’ve got in the reception there? It’s like, in some Neoplatonic way, they honestly believe these characters are real, that they’re alive on Sherman Glad’s World Aleph or someplace like that. They know they can’t come out and say that without sounding crazy, but deep in their hearts, I think they need to feel that it’s all somehow true. I think that in a world where our traditional ideas of God have pretty much disintegrated, but where there’s that fundamental human want for something sacred, maybe some kitsch monster such as Thunderman is all that we’ve got left that feels like a religion. There. So, have I satisfied your morbid curiosity?

  WHEEMS: You’ve always done more than that. Denny Wellworth, thank you for your time.

  WELLWORTH: Dan, I can’t jerk off no more, so, seriously, it’s my pleasure. (LAUGHS)

  18. (September, 2015)

  Though there will fortunately never be pornography that’s comprehensible to three-year-olds, Satyricon went to considerable effort in imagining what such a thing might look like. WELCOME TO SATYRICON! Throughout the history of orgies, never had there previously existed opportunity for thousands of participants to publicly convene, provocatively costumed as high-booted power people or as cartoon animals in fishnets, have their gasping permutations advertised from coast to coast, and get a goody-bag to take home with them. WELCOME TO SATYRICON! Approximately thirty floors of inappropriate obsession, hotel corridors with Escher tessellations of ingeniously interlocking furries, and in one secluded nook, Ormazda’s sunburst helmet with a pre-loved condom in it. WELCOME TO SATYRICON! It was a long, long way from Jesus and Connecticut.

  Dick Duckley’s tummy harboured a few caterpillars, not yet hatched to butterflies, when he arrived in the capacious lobby, making a far less arresting entrance than he would accomplish later. Some convention staff were hard at work assembling the Brandon Chuff memorial exhibit in the foyer, where serene glass elevators lifted silently into the atrium’s cathedral heights, and the low murmur of incoming guests was like a wake or lullaby. He registered, then stood in the reception area with his head tipped back, drawing deep breaths to calm the caterpillars, trying to take everything in. This world was just so big, and for some time now, he’d suspected that it wasn’t even the right world, as if he were the wrong alternate version of himself, stuck on the wrong alternate Earth.

  He found the main hall, hardly the asylum circus that it would be later, but still jiggling with activity, still noisy, and looked in on the Bordello Comics stand. Tony and Steve were there, manning the booth and stacking up trade paperbacks for the Orgasmics signing in the afternoon. There was a washed-out-looking blonde girl in a long coat that he thought might be the model that they’d hired to dress as Oral Lass, but, obviously, there wasn’t any easy way to ask her that. Then Steve said that Amanda in accounts had called him, saying she’d been trying to get ahold of Duckley, and did Duckley have his phone switched off? Dick Duckley giggled, said he’d see to it, and in his bowel, unfurling monarchs tested sticky wings.

  Making excuses in a series of unfinished sentences, he told them that he needed to check out his room and drop his bags off, but that he’d call by to hang out later. Turning before they could see his churning face, he pushed his way back through the gathering crowd, towards the lobby and its crystal elevators. Out of all the people that he squeezed past, Duckley was the only one in disguise as a normal person. While he waited for his ride up to the twenty-seventh floor, a pair of demons sauntered past him, one male and one female, fire-engine red with horns and tails. Both looked at him with knowing little smiles, and Duckley was immediately certain that they weren’t a couple playing dress-up; that they were aware of all the business with Amanda in accounts; and, worst of all, they weren’t in any hurry. They could take their time. He wasn’t going anywhere. When his glass box arrived, he flung himself inside and pressed the buttons for his floor, heart hammering. The door slid shut. Shaking their spiky heads and chuckling, the tag team devils walked by without looking at him, flicking barbed and crimson tails behind them.

  The transparent car ascended, and his view of the transfigured lobby swelled beneath as in a bulbous lens. A hundred costumes swirled, become a marbling of delirious colour wherein pagan gods and storm troopers vaped genially, and different species traded contact details. Bilious hallucination, eddying about a central altarpiece commemorating the deceased United Supermen scribe and late editor-in-chief, its huge framed photograph of Brandon Chuff in flattering black and white receding underneath the elevator’s see-through floor. Duckley exhaled.

  Internally the Lepidoptera were thriving, rousing in a gorgeous murmuration, painted sails batting his lungs and fluttering in his throat. For all he knew of science, it might only be their flapping excitation that allowed the glazed cube to rise up, into the gaping atrium that rang with whispered sibilants. The herd phantasmagoria of the lobby was a drift of pointillism now. This whole crazed celebration, Duckley felt, it was like everybody knew that this was the apocalypse, and not just him. This was the time of Revelation, at least for Amanda in accounts. Everything hidden would be made clear as an elevator. Everyone would know what he had done, and not just Momma, Poppa and the other angels, who all knew already. Momma would be crying, and his father would be so, so mad that Duckley was almost relieved to know he wouldn’t have to meet with them in heaven, not if the vermillion duo downstairs meant what he assumed they did.

  For late September, Dallas seemed uncomfortably hot, an appetiser for inferno. Surmounting his background radiation of anxiety and fear were spikes of furious resentment at the person who’d initiated his hell-bound trajectory. He’d heard unsympathetic people say that this was Worsley Porlock, but that wasn’t so. Porlock was Duckley’s friend, almost an older brother, while the author of Dick Duckley’s fall from grace – the succubus who’d dragged him by his penis from salvation – that was Peggy Parks. That was the flame-haired, winking Jezebel who his own poppa had delivered him into the lewd and practised hands of, when he’d been no more than a defenceless boy.

  The outhouse made of windows chimed discreetly to announce that it had reached his floor, and he stepped out to fitted-carpet altitudes. Almost as soon as he’d emerged from its fishbowl interior, the elevator’s door resealed itself with a pneumatic sigh and it commenced its downward journey back towards the lobby and its soup of cruising harlequins. Laying the damp palm of his bag-free hand against the smooth wood of the balustrade, he leaned his upper body over and peered down to watch the square-cut, hollow gem in its descent. Three or four hundred feet below, the lobby was no more, now, than a vividly infested Petri dish. Experiencing moral vertigo, he turned away from the colossal dried-up wishing well and set off through an arrowed labyrinth, seeking sanctuary without personality, but with a spyholed door that he could double-lock.

  Once in his room, he sat there on the bed, heavy as Rodin marble, and fished out his mobile. Six missed calls, all from Amanda in accounts. He thought if he just listened to the first one, then perhaps it wouldn’t be as bad as he’d imagined.

  ‘Dick? This is Amanda in accounts. I need those cash receipts you promised me, like, straight away? I know you’re off at the convention, but you need to sort this out right now. The people at head office are concerned, Dick, and this isn’t going to wait till Monday. Call me when you get this.’

  Oh, God. Oh, God, this was terrible. She sounded so steamed up, and that was just the first of her unanswered voicemails. He decided not to listen to the rest. He stood up. He sat down again. He stood up and paced like a stuck automaton along the strip of space between the bed and bathroom, making the high-pitched and frightened ‘nnnnnnnnnn’ sounds that he’d made since childhood when he didn’t want his circumstances to be happening.

  His life enclosed him like a band of hornets, vying for attention with the swarming butterflies inside. Raised in Connecticut, raised in seclusion, just his momma and his poppa and his tutors, and so Peggy Parks had been the first girl outside Momma that he’d ever seen, and how could they not know what that would do to him? And when they died, nnnnnnnnnn, he’d been all alone except the help and Thunderman, but his friend Worsley rescued him, and got him his dream job in comics, and explained about the powder that gives people confidence, and sold him a great page of art with Peggy naked so you could see everything. And it was all terrific, but he hadn’t known that he’d need so much confidence, or that it cost so much, or that he’d get through it so quickly. Nnnnnnnnnn. Back at the start, when things were great, he thought he’d got it figured out: the world ordered by God that his momma and poppa had believed in wasn’t this world. From his observations, Duckley had concluded that the world that he was in, with virtue ridiculed and with vice everywhere unpunished, was most probably the morally reversed World Daleth, where the Droll and Felix Firestone were the heroes who protected everyone from Killer Bee and Plunderman. So good was bad, and bad was good, and he’d had sex with women and got drunk, and all his friends thought that was funny, so he’d started stealing money from Bordello Comics, where he worked, to pay for all the powdered confidence, and now, nnnnnnnnnn, now Amanda in accounts was asking for receipts and, nnnnnnnnnn, and butterflies were coming down his nose, and, nnnnnnnnnn, what was he going to do?

  Then all at once, amidst his pacing turmoil, Duckley knew. His problem was itself the answer to his problem. He retrieved the jar with his supplies in from his shoulder bag and took it through into the bathroom’s bright electric hum, where he did three fat lines, which killed the butterflies like DDT, and straight away, this surely temporary snag looked nowhere near as bad. Promising, even.

  He’d always been pretty certain that Amanda in accounts had got a thing for him. When Duckley made a dirty comment, she’d make this tight little smile to let him know she liked it when he talked like that. So if he told her that he’d put those receipts in the mail to her, like, weeks ago but, like a jerk, he didn’t send them registered, then she’d most likely shake her head and smile indulgently and say she’d smooth the whole thing over with head office, and maybe they’d date.

  It really did feel so much better now he had a plan. He exited the bathroom a new man and went to stand before the window, where he gazed out over Dallas with a roguish smile – a supervillain overseeing his domain. Only he didn’t know what he was looking at, nor yet in which direction, so he fixed himself a Scotch out of the minibar to take the edge off, and went back to sitting on the bed. He guessed that he’d been getting pretty crazy there, before his confidence had been restored. He felt sort of ashamed now, and especially about his unfair thoughts concerning Peggy Parks. None of his problems – which were solved now – had been Peggy’s fault, and even with her red hair, she was not the scarlet woman of apocalypse that he had thought her in his panic. Peggy was his muse, his girlfriend that he shared with Thunderman, and he was lucky that he had her in his life, because without her, her and Worsley, now his parents were no more, well, there’d be nobody.

  He swirled the liquor in his glass and took a muddy aesthetic pleasure in the tilting of the surface’s ellipse, half silvered, with Dick Duckley looking back at him. He thought of Poppa, all those years back, and what he now realised was his father’s own unique theology, where any entertainment was a snare of Satan, except Thunderman. He remembered Poppa’s voice when the old man explained it to him. ‘God the Father has been worshipped under many names since history began, as Yahweh, Zeus or Jupiter, and all these names mean Thunderman.’ Poppa’s interpretation had gone kind of haywire after that, chiefly because he had mistakenly thought Thunderboy to be the son of Thunderman, rather than Thunderman himself when he was younger. In his father’s even-newer testament, the teenage Thunderboy was Jesus, sent to our world by his father, Thunderman, from heaven, which was Thunderland, except that Poppa had got that mixed up with Thunder Mountain, and had probably conflated Thunder Mountain with Olympus. He could understand how Poppa got confused, when the one thing more complicated than the continuity in comics was the continuity that’s in the Bible, and combining them, to say the least, was an ambitious crossover. His father hadn’t done a bad job, all in all, on his Thunderman heresy. Abner and Eliza Bell became Joseph and Mary, Felix Firestone’s name alone made him an obvious Satan, the Tomorrow Friends were the disciples, Peggy Parks was Mary Magdalene, and possibly Zando the Thunderdog was the dog in the manger, although Duckley felt that Poppa had been reaching with that last one.

  Shafts of gold light fell into his room and striped the crisp white pillows. Everything was good again now. His convention head was on, and he was at a gathering famed for its fornicating franchises. What was he doing up here on his own? He put on a clean T-shirt from his bag, one with a winking Oral Lass that bore the legend ‘Going Down’, and just in time remembered his convention ID lanyard, worn albatross-style about his neck. One more line as a top-up and then, with his key card safe in a back pocket, he stepped out into the hyperreal fugue of Satyricon.

  The dream-plague of the lobby had by now transmitted lurid masquerade infections to these upper reaches, so that corridors and landings thronged with creatures leaked from haunted television features a half-century old, from movies with special effects as leading men, comics creations from six months ago who had already been rebooted out of continuity. He saw a waist-high pack of Matrakoy Dust-Dwellers, robed and hooded, who were perhaps flirting enigmatically with a cohort of halfling warriors from Mittelgard, but it was hard to tell. Beneath grey cowls or dog-faced helmets, they were either persons of restricted growth or grade-school kids, and neither was a wholly nerving prospect. As he waited for the lucid elevator, he watched a prismatic paint-chip spread of Beetle Boys, some five or six of them, group-hugging into a configuration like an antique TV colour-test card. It looked like a single multiphasic personality attempting, strenuously, to reintegrate.