Big Pulp: A Question of Storage

By Big Pulp

A massive collection of pornography inspires a brilliant MIT student to explore the limits of the human mind in "A Question of Storage" by John Bowker, the featured story in the Spring 2013 issue of Big Pulp (cover art by Phil Good). This issue also features more than 25 more great stories and poems from Steven Axelrod, K.C. Ball, Robert Bagnall, Michael Bracken, Alison Downs, Malon Edwards, Milo James Fowler, Lee Hammerschmidt, Tom Larsen, Tim Lieder, Luke Lloyd, Court Merrigan, James A. Newman, Thomas Pluck, Erin Pringle-Toungate, Terrie Leigh Relf, Jason Reynolds, Shane D. Rhinewald, Wayne Scheer, K.C. Shaw, Catherine Batac Walder, Dustin Walker, Changming Yuan, and Lee Zumpe

• Language: English
• Publisher: Big Pulp
• Release date: Mar 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301001767

Big Pulp

Since 2008, Big Pulp has published the best in fantastic fiction from around the globe. We publish periodicals - including Big Pulp, Child of Words, M, and Thirst - and themed anthologies.

Book preview

Big Pulp Spring 2013

A Question of Storage

Exter Press

Bill Olver, editor

Bill Boslego, associate editor (editorial)

Phil Good, associate editor (art direction)

Big Pulp Vol. 4, No. 1 (whole issue #8)

March 2013

ISSN 2167-6046 (print)

ISSN 2167-6054 (electronic)

Big Pulp is published quarterly in March, June, September and December by Exter Press. 
All credited material is copyright by the author(s). All other material © 2013 Exter Press

The stories and poems in this magazine are fictitious and any resemblance between the characters in them and any persons living or dead—without satirical intent—is purely coincidental.

Reproduction or use of any written or pictorial content without the permission of the editors or authors is strictly forbidden, with the exception of fair use for review purposes.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ROMANCE

A Question of Storage by John Bowker

Within the Rain Zone by Changming Yuan

My Wife Has Black Hair by Tim Lieder

Less than Three but No More than Two by Alison Downs

Buddies by Wayne Scheer

FANTASY

This Little Piggy by K.C. Ball

Iron Pump, Hard Water by Catherine Batac Walder

Alehouse Dragon by Michael Bracken

MYSTERY

Open Frame by Lee Hammerschmidt

Mercury by Tom Larsen

Donkey Dick by Thomas Pluck

The Stand-In by Steven Axelrod

ADVENTURE

Harbinger of Arroyo Seco by Milo James Fowler

HORROR

The Sirens of McIlvane Gap by Jason Reynolds

Red Teeth, Red Sails by K.C. Shaw

The Rabbit by Erin Pringle-Toungate

That One Shot by Dustin Walker

horroku by Terrie Leigh Relf

SCIENCE FICTION

Repelling Down the Miranda Ice Cliffs by Lee Zumpe

Martian Sprawl by Lee Zumpe

The Unwritten Mythology of Mars by Lee Zumpe

Paula by Court Merrigan

The Future of Vanity by Luke Lloyd

Johnny Fatlip meets Lucy Pearl in: Undersea Grand Larceny by Malon Edwards

Two Lumps and a Pair of Glasses by James A. Newman

The Digital Mortician by Robert Bagnall

Anonymous Graffiti by Shane D. Rhinewald

Cover illustration by Phil Good

John Bowker has been published in On Spec, Andromeda Spaceways, and Sybil’s Garage, as well as in anthologies such as Sex in the System, Spicy Slipstream Stories, and A Field Guide to Surreal Botany.

______________

A QUESTION OF STORAGE

An old man sits in a quiet room, watching the movement of time.

That’s right, he says. He’s your sixty minute man.

His voice echoes strangely off the bare cinder-block, a sharp synaesthetic throb. The room is cold; hands gnarled by arthritis ache with the chill and he folds them under the blanket in his lap. Throughout the building technicians are moving in disciplined frenzies while massive computers struggle to dissipate the heat of last minute calculations. Pens click on checklists and cameras focus in on the valley below.

None of this interests him. He stares at a large industrial analog clock mounted on the wall, counting the seconds.

The eye altered alters all; behind his milky irises he dances on an axonal tightrope. One moment the clock is ugly but functional, three hands on a plain white face marking 6:11am, the third sweeping toward 12 with an audible tick. In the next, a web of bacterial circuitry smears Vaseline across the lens of his perceptions and it is something else entirely.

The three turgid shafts stroke across a pale rubenesque, ecstasy marked by the slap of flesh and a humid funk of heat and musk piped directly to his anterior cortex without benefit of senses. Worshiping the yonic shape, the trio mount and overlap each other in omnisexual tumescence, sixty seconds, an hour, twelve. Their speed is inverse to length and the union never, ever stops.

It is true. It isn’t the size, it’s what you do with it.

He has spent his entire life working toward this moment. And the future is waiting just outside the door.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

When Alexander’s father purchased the first magazine in the spring of 1968, he never considered the consequences.

Not the moral or social ones. The young woman who spilled full-color from the glossy centerfold in the musty back racks of the local tobacconist had seemed healthy and happy, 33’-24’-34’ of all-American girl. A lifetime of exploitation in the old country had rendered Vito D’Angelo resistant to the notion of having one’s photo taken as an exploitative act. A concept too complex to be absorbed by a man who laid bricks, as long as one kept the magazine out of church Vito could find no sin in the pleasures of smiling girlflesh.

What he had not considered was the question of storage.

A magazine year is measured in inches, a single glossy issue occupying as much as a quarter that after browsing. With monthly purchases, anniversary editions, a swollen holiday double-size, a completist might acquire as many as nine inches a year to archive, preserve and store.

Considered by itself, nine inches doesn’t seem like much.

Of course, that assumes the collector limits himself to just one magazine.

When Alexander’s mother divorced Vito in the spring of 1981, a disreputable wall of breasts and come-hither smiles rose to block the sunlight in front of their tenement. Sitting at the top of the basement stairs, Alexander watched through his Keds as a sad parade of neatly labeled cardboard boxes left through the bulkhead to mark the borders of his father’s Coventry on the sidewalk outside. The sheer weight leaving the D’Angelo household surpassed by a large margin all that remained inside, and practical even at nine, young Alexander had wondered at the waste.

Mama? Wouldn’t someone give us money for these?

His mother was a stolid, thick-wristed Catholic woman, tempered by the steam of boiling pasta pots, her shoulders bent from carrying the weight of her household. Her face was lined with worry but even with two years of perdition on each shoulder she paused to consider Alexander’s question as she always did.

No, she said after a moment. These are worth nothing to no one. And with a mighty heave, she laid another row in her growing wall of fallen women, pausing to spit on the ground in disgust as she closed the bulkhead door behind them.

Until his dying day, Alexander would claim his mother was the smartest, most beautiful woman he had ever known. She was wrong about one thing however. Long after she had fallen asleep that night, from his bedroom window Alexander learned the contents of the boxes had value to someone.

There had always been an uneasy oft-violated truce between the Italian and Irish children in their neighborhood, a careful distance broken by occasional bouts of violence in the parking lots of church basketball games and on the birthdays of saints. As such, it was an act of some daring for the youngest of the seven McGowan brothers to cross the ethnic turf boundaries and clamber to the top of the wall to unfasten one of Mrs. D’Angelo’s carefully taped flaps. Even from his window, Alexander could see Timmy McGowan’s eyes widen with astonishment. What followed was a sudden revocation of all nationalistic and ethnic boundaries, a jangling on a newly formed potato-pasta wireless that spread through both communities in a call of peace, love, and understanding.

They came in darkness and they came in numbers, pushing wheelbarrows, wagons and shopping carts, wrestling the handtrucks their fathers used to load kegs into the back of neighborhood bars. The baritone and squeak of cracked voices echoed down the street as skinny pubescent arms were overladen with piles higher than the carrier’s head. Stuffed to the point of rupture, boxes spilled brightly colored pools of skin under the streetlights. There was enough for all and there was remarkably little friction as Alexander’s father’s collection disappeared in less than an hour, absorbed into the collective adolescent bloodstream of the neighborhood.

When Alexander walked the streets the next morning the world had changed. He was greeted by even the hardest of the neighborhood hard cases with a kind of awed gratitude, their ranks parting as he passed, his lunch money unmolested. In the hour of his father’s greatest misfortune, he had become holy, untouchable.

In the years afterward, he would follow the paths of those scattered fragments of father’s legacy, the archaeologist of a night that had passed into legend. In clubhouses and basements, in pop-up trailers in driveways and sliding his hands into the interstices of mattresses and boxsprings during visits to friends’ houses, he would find the tattered remnants, their pages softened by use. He noted their effects in the dissension that rose unexpectedly in third period Health class, a spirited discussion about the location of the clitoris. When Jean Marie Difonzo without explanation kissed Alexander at his high school graduation, it was a peck on the cheek, a kiss of thanks and appreciation; later he saw her bestow a much larger and more open-mouthed kiss on Margie McIntyre behind the bandstand. His father’s passion had changed lives, and on the cusp of manhood, this surprised him not at all.

He had discovered something powerful.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Unlike his father, his storage problem was not space. It was heat that drove him to create the process.

MIT had known what to do with a quiet boy, one with a talent for math, an interest in biology, and walls of disk arrays lining his apartment, terabytes spinning through the night with LEDs flickering like permanent Christmas. His father’s entire scanned collection would be barely a drop in that ocean of stored data but the Internet was a river that flowed to the sea; each day brought new advances in resolution, motion, sound and personal taste. The waterline was rising too fast and college to graduate school, graduate school to medical school, Alexander’s storage solutions were the exhausted sandbaggers of the dykes and catch basins of the world’s arousal. His landlord’s knock on the door was the final indication that the mean temperature of that ocean had risen out of control.

The floor, she’s hot, Alexander.

Mr. Bukharov had arrived in the US two decades before, lacking sufficient English for any job save driving a late night taxi. After twenty years, two stabbings and a gunshot wound to his right buttock through the taxicab seat, he’d parlayed his savings and strict regimen of thirty English words a week into a string of three-decker apartments, one of them the same third-floor walkup he’d first rented when he arrived.

"When Mrs. Bukharov watches her stories in the afternoon, she has to open the window. In December, Alexander. The heat, it’s a good thing, but maybe a little too much of a good thing, eh?" He took in the array of whirring machinery, the sound masked by the overwrought grinding of Alexander’s industrial air conditioners.

What do you do with all this, hah?

Mr. Bukharov was a silver-haired grandfather twice over, hunched from years behind the wheel and a wound that brought him no end of ridicule at the local clubhouse where the old Uzbek men gathered to drink muddy black coffee on summer evenings. His tiny bird of a wife always left a covered plate of pilau by Alexander’s door on Sundays. There is no shame in a vocation, but neither did the Bukharov’s need to know such obsessions existed in the world. Alexander hedged.

Research, Mr. Bukharov. Large amounts of data. And growing larger all the time, he reflected. An exponential progression.

Alexander, you’re a nice boy. But your lease is up at the end of June. Maybe it’s time for somewhere else? Somewhere bigger? You go to school for your entire life, Bukharov spread his hands wide, you need the whole world. A little place like this, these little machines, they can’t contain a brain like yours. And besides, all this heat is bad for the paint. Mrs. Bukharov gets the headaches at night, like hammers she says…

Bukharov continued but Alexander was no longer listening. Little machines cannot contain a brain.

But a brain can contain little machines. And the whole world was waiting.

Mr. Bukharov had barely begun to describe the difficulties Mrs. Bukharov’s headaches could have on a marriage, even one as loving as theirs, when Alexander interrupted.

I’m sorry for everything, Mr. Bukharov. Consider this my notice. I’ll be moving out at the end of the month.

So soon? Bukharov surveyed the massive air conditioners and his face became shrewd. Those big units leave big holes in the walls, you know. Your deposit—

Consider them my gift to you and Mrs. Bukharov. I won’t need them anymore.

Remove from your life the things you don’t need, yes! My people have a saying. ‘Moving is half a fire.’ He held out his hand and Alexander shook it. Mrs. Bukharov and I will put your other half to good use.

Alexander was as good as his word; he was gone from the apartment even before the last day of his lease, taking his excessive heat and apparently Mrs. Bukharov’s headaches with him. Seven months later, the elderly couple was found dead in their bed in Alexander’s old apartment, soft smiles on their faces, their entwined naked bodies victims of extreme hypothermia brought on by misunderstanding the controls on the industrial cooling units. By then however, twelve million microscopic needles had pierced the bone cage of Alexander’s skull, ejaculating their payload of superconductor gel into a coagulating mesh across the surface of his brain. By then, he wasn’t paying attention to the news at all.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

It was everywhere and everything and Alexander found it impossible to imagine how he’d never seen it before. Tab A to Slot B, the flared head of a spoon slipping deep into a steaming mug of coffee, Zorro’s gay blade, as the neurological mesh targeted and contracted, it was the obvious, the Freudian, that manifested first. A cigar may well be only a cigar, but once it touched the lips, biologically and computationally it was quite the other thing. As the process accelerated and expanded with each new stimulus the connections became harder to explain. Corrugated cardboard was an unexpected goldmine of erotic potential. A local doughnut shop held him rapt for nearly an hour, eyes glazed with lust. A parking lot was a sudden feast of auto-erotic amusement, low-slung curves, beckoning openings, the irresistible totems of phallus exaqueo. Journaling the experience, Alexander could only liken it to infancy; every sense was new, every object an unknown to be touched, smelled, tasted. Like a second Big Bang, the erotic universe was hurtling out in every direction, waiting for him to explore its farthest reaches.

Once, he took a lover. It didn’t end well.

Melinda had seemed an inspired match, so deeply submerged in her own omphaloskepsis that his split attention would pass without notice. A self-made poet if the definition of self-made included the skill of marrying well, in between rare writing sessions she had ample free time to seek opportunities for self-promotion and the occasional surrogate for her absent husband. She gave lavish parties, volunteered for the right causes, and no friend’s misfortune was too small for her to fall upon them with offers of aid, the better to mourn her selflessness in print.

Living in a state of almost permanent bifurcation, Alexander was the perfect companion. He would accompany her—to openings, dinner parties, readings in independent bookstores—and go almost completely unnoticed, a near invisible helpmate who would not draw the spotlight but could listen for hours to her self-assessments of her performance, her disappointment at a low turnout or the success of another poet she considered beneath her stature. His consciousness split between his inner and outer worlds, there was enough room to coddle and soothe her neuroses while continuing to explore his own neurological erotopia. It took the better part of a month before she realized his attention might be even fractionally elsewhere.

You’re a million miles away, Alex, she said.

They were in a small cafe not far from her apartment, the rain sheeting down outside the windows as she rustled through a pile of stapled and xeroxed poetry magazines. She had been commenting wittily about the histories and failings of each poet as she smudged cheap ink fingerprints onto her oversized latte mug.

He smiled and nodded in agreement, still watching the sluice and glide of bodies in the rain outside. The air blanket-thick, droplets glistened on cheeks and lips in a slow cascade—

Alex!

He caught himself, refocusing his gaze and releasing his mental hold on the switch that split his consciousness. He took a moment to take her in, really looking at her for the first time in weeks.

What’s with you today? You haven’t been paying attention to me at all. She brushed away a wispy strand of grayish hair, the black dye having bled away into the stale bleach underneath. She was shivering, dressed slightly too revealing for the weather, her attempt to keep up with her bohemian neighborhood which seemed to be growing ever more youthful while her own aging continued in the opposite direction.

Tell me what you’re thinking. She hesitated. Please?

She was narcissistic, neurotic, and whatever talents she had were overshadowed by her need to make sure they were recognized. There was no reason to reveal his secret to her when he’d kept it for so long without discovery.

He told her everything. And once he had, Melinda would not rest until she had the process for herself.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

He performed the operation a month later, appreciating the luxury of manipulating the trephination process on a brain not his own. Through the tinted glass of the control room window, he watched as the anesthetic began to flow, millions of microscopic pinpricks of light glowing on her shaved scalp. She met his eyes, and for a moment, for perhaps the first time in his life, he felt he had something in common with another human being.

The operation proceeded flawlessly. The various telltales and monitors all verified the accuracy of placement, all indicators remained green from the moment the drills descended until the supersonic whine of steel on bone had ceased. It wasn’t until the next morning it became clear that something had gone terribly wrong.

You’re reading the newspaper, he said as they sat to breakfast. Anesthesia had left Melinda groggy for much of the previous day, unable to stand, much less eat. He’d expected her to be ravenous.

Instead she stared fixedly at the morning Times. The page that faced him advertised a particular brand of men’s underwear; grapes were arrayed in