Death got off his lazy a*s or the Magically Mysterious Quasi-Biography.

Annie discovers the possible origin of Van Gag and Death decides to be a fickle son of a b***h.

The first thing Annie Morrison noticed about the room was that the room was immensely different from when last she had entered it. Albeit she had only seen it briefly, she had been able to see enough of the room to know that it was just another fancy hotel room with little beyond ridiculously expensive furniture and nude Greek statues that the rich seemed to believe was the only type of art worth celebrating. Now the room looked as if someone had decided that reality wasn’t worth the feces it was painted on, and decided that taking mass amounts of drugs was the answer. The rug below her feet was a swirling vortex of primary colors clashing violently against neon colors, which were in the form of inconsistently shaped “rings”. All around were couches of various size and shape. One was designed to look like an open letter where the closed flap of the envelope was the backrest and the envelope itself the cushions. Another was shaped like a narwhal hunting down small elephants to devour. Annie’s personal favorite, however, was not even a couch: a statue of Atlas holding up the world. The world, however, was hollowed out to make an ovular chair you have doubtlessly seen before; and it is within this chair that Van Gag sat. At first Annie believed his attention was focused entirely on the vast amounts of artwork of all kinds which adorned the walls, but when he rapidly turned his eyes downward to a small cube in his hands, she realized the walls had merely distracted him. She could not quite see what was within the cube that fascinated Van Gag so, but she could hear the occasional shout of incomprehensible dialogue resound from the cube. ‘Maybe it is alive?’ she thought to herself with both wonder and amusement.

            Annie stood there for another three minutes, before Van Gag finally turned his attention from the box…and saw Annie.

            “Oh, heh, hello Annie!” chuckled Van Gag with an embarrassed grin on his face. “How long have you been standing there? I’m terribly sorry if I’ve been keeping you!”

            “No, not at all Van.”

            “Please, call me Van Gag. I hate the shortening of “Van Gag” to “Van”. It reminds me of a silly dream I had as a kid that has caused me to have an irrational fear of being a van. Sounds stupid, I know, but you would be afraid of being a van too if you had to transport small daycare children who all have irritable bowel syndrome and a desire to chew on anything even slightly sanitary. And they all recited terrible goth poetry in between screaming, crapping all over me, and chewing on the parts of me not covered in feces. Terrible dream really.”

            Van Gag reached his hand out and a different hand extended from a painting of Mickey Mouse, which handed him a glass filled with an unknown liquid substance. It looked like soda one second, water the next, bourbon the next, ginger ale, and so on and so forth. Instead of taking a sip, Van Gag just stared down into its depths as if within it laid some secret beyond the knowledge of mankind. If Buffo’s micro civilization theory was right, then within it really was some secret beyond the knowledge of mankind (or 14 quintillion of them).

            “Who are you, Van Gag, and why were you searching for me? And how did you know all of those things about Owl Athena and Mr.Marchinni?”

            “I am, for all intents and purposes, a demi-god. Once a Dada mated with a human and I am the ever so odd result.”

            “Who are the Dada?”

            Van Gag smiled widely at this. “Thank Odin you didn’t ask what! Of the few who have heard this tale, or a variation of it, most have asked WHAT are the Dada, as if they are not living beings. You’re one of the very few who have been paying attention and not made yourself look like a dunce!”

            A whistle one would commonly hear at a birthday party blew from somewhere behind her at top celebratory volume, when a party hat dropped on her head like a leaf.

            The whistle stopped suddenly and Van Gag began to sit in a pose often associated with Buddhist or Hindu meditation. He looked down upon Annie, who looked rather disorientated by his idiosyncratic burst of glee.

            “I’m sorry Annie,” apologized Van Gag with both sincerity and humor in equal doses. “As you may have noticed, I’m more than a tad eccentric in my mannerisms. The folks told me it was part of my heritage, nature and nurture and all that, but I blame the mercury they use in the rectal thermometers they used on me as a wee baby. Mercury poisoning originating in the anus; how cruel and more than a little hilarious in its own right.”

            “Anyway, the Dada are divine gods of Chaos and Imagination and Subjectivity. They have existed since the dawn of independent thought, back when the first bacteria decided that growing some appendages would be pretty dandy.”

            “So they are like Jesus or Odin or Hera or other gods?”

            Van Gag paused to consider how best to answer this, for it was not a simple answer. For a few seconds it eluded him, and this silence caused Annie some discomfort.

            “They are more powerful than gods, but they do not have a religion/mythology devoted to them, nor are they completely concrete. It would be more appropriate to call them manifestations of Absurdity both creative and bizarre. Formed from thoughts and fed by them, instead of prayers, as gods are. So you could say they are gods, but that would be like saying the Neiman Lion is the same as your typical everyday lion.”

            As the last syllable fell from his lips, Van Gag got up and adjusted his Calvin and Hobbes tie over his Dr.Frank’N’Furter style drag. “I have to urinate greatly. While I am using the special urinal I will communicate to you more of the story through Dave.” Without a word more, he walked smoothly to a door that had not been there before.

            Annie looked about, rather uncomfortable at the idea of another being in the room, when a small platypus crawled from the carpeted ocean of the floor. The platypus shook itself like a dog and proceeded to draw a small fedora from the ocean it had crawled from as if he were the oceanic to land steps of evolution.

            “As I was saying,” said Dave in a voice similar to Van Gag’s but unique in its own right. “I was born to a Dada and a magician, who both derived pleasure from confusing me on which one was which. My theory for years was that my mother was the Dada, but I started to wonder when she spontaneously gave birth to a baby rhino. Curses as such don’t usually work on Dada, but there are Dada curses. And the folks could have planned it to throw me off the trail of knowing; I’ll never bloody know.”
            “They raised me on a small “farm” where magically enhanced DNA strands were constructed and sold to people who either liked to eat them or used to build supersoldiers to topple empires. They never would tell me that either.”

            Van Gag paused, as in thought as anyone could ever appear to be, and stared off into the seizure inducing metamorphic color constructs of the ceiling. Annie tried to follow his gaze but once her eyes hit the erratic insanity of the ceiling she averted her gaze for fear of having the colors forever branded to the membranes of her eyes. It was a beautiful sight for all of the 2.5 milliseconds the human eye could look on painlessly, but it was very similar to if a person who lived in a dark cave all of their life saw the result the sexual relations between Apollo and a lava lamp and several buckets filled with LSD.

            Finally, Van Gag came back in wearing a full suit and a top hat with the anarchy symbol blazed into it with a red, paint like material.

            “Sorry again, for my mind often wanders about amongst the shaded oaks of the past and the bright conifers of the future. The quick version is that I left home after my mom and dad accidently committed a bonding ritual when they fell into a large vat of loose, liquefied DNA. As you may not know, the result was likely something even Gandhi would have aborted with a large metal hammer. Kind of like a giant waffle of sinister death, but with the potential to tear the ecosystems of the Infiniverse apart with a single fart. I remember feeding the hungry b*****d Tootsie-Pops laced with various micro-poisons for three days before it finally decided that committing suicide by turning its atoms against one another was a better option. Perhaps I shouldn’t have done that, for the entire 51^st state was obliterated from this world and all mental traces of it were wiped and inexplicably replaced with the strange desire to prove Freud right. It took a DAMN LONG TIME to fix that disaster.”

            Van Gag then broke into a strong bout of laughter which echoed and rang off of imaginary cave walls. Eventually, he started choking out the rest of his tale through the laughter. “I hadn’t…HAHA…seen so much…mother fixation…HAHAHAHA…since the original Psycho! Freud would’ve loved this!”

            “I’ve been a roadie, a gonzo journalist, a hooker, a cartoonist, a prince of another universe for a brief spell, a novelist, a painter, and a monk. I’ve seen every nook and cranny of the world, public and secret alike, at least twice. I’ve experienced a large percentage of the colors of life and I have divulged from my experiences that the world just sucks too goddamn much to not have fun. People change and die and turn on you. Hate runs rampant, rape and murder follow organic life like flies, and power is abused like a small puppy that s***s on the carpet. But despite that, there is a party, a story, a dream, a kiss. We are stuck on this world condemned by the extremely primitive mental capacities of the masses, so why not make the best of it? Live life, be happy, have fun, and if you see a rapist, turn his dick into a rocketship full of elephants. And if you can’t bend reality, just hit the b*****d with a baseball bat until his nuts fall off.”

            Annie considered this for a good long while, taking adequate time to reflect on each aspect and relate it to her own personal experiences. While she had never had to kill her parents who had become a waffle of death nor had she done many of the other strange things Van Gag had done, she could still sympathize, and in some aspects, empathize. The ignorance of the masses is the bane of every intellectual, but Van Gag had struck a critical chord in her psyche. He had almost sung of her philosophies without ever seeing them. Either he was lucky, a mindreader, or there was some friendly connection that hadn’t been there before. Despite it all, she was feeling comfortable with him. He got it, he understood, and he knew he couldn’t do a goddamn thing about it, so he just had fun instead.

            “So Annie, how was your childhood like? Parent’s didn’t turn into mutant death waffles did they?” chuckled Van Gag good naturedly, with honest curiosity.

            Annie froze up for a second at the mention of her parents, but quickly relaxed in an attempt to hide her brief cryo-cerebral freeze. Van Gag noticed it out of the corner of his perception, but he failed to keep the fleeting image burned into his brain for more than a few moments. A question attempted to worm its way out of Van Gag’s mouth before dissipating as the thought did. Later, the dream of the crying girl and the graves would prompt him to inquire, but for now he could not hear the chirps of gulls on the grey sky nor could he feel the ever grim presence of the reaper.  No, for now, he could only hear Annie’s voice as she smoothly changed the subject.

            “Why me?” asked Annie as the glass of the window between her and Van Gag exploded into a frenzied whirlwind of glass shards. Like snowflakes and hail they fell as they violently decimated billions of micro societies. Prayers for micro gods to save them were enveloped in the sheer visual and sound chaos that shook the very building to its core. A gunshot rang like some demented church bell, and Dave had his brains exit through the backdoor of his head as if a bouncer from the depths of hell were chasing them from a nightclub. As soon as the body of Dave the platypus hit the floor, another body, alive as could be, landed with a thump upon the floor. The glass snow briefly obscured the mortality of the person, giving them a frightening, otherworldly appearance and voice.

            “Come with me, servant of the Dada, or the girl will die.”

            Annie thought for sure Death had finally gotten off his lazy a*s and decided that enough was damn well enough. Surely one couldn’t escape Death forever? One can run from Death, but they cannot hide forever. In actuality, the identity of the person in the snow of glass was only slightly more alarming.

            Alexander Wagner suppressed a smile as he leveled a shiny pistol at Annie.

            “Did you hear me, servant of the Dada? Disregard my wishes and she will die.”