POTATO MOON, Part 70: “Origins and Revelations” by Robert Fuller

“The wot, milady?” asked the confused vole.

“Never mind!” snapped the Potato Goddess. “Which direction did they go?”

“Well… that is… I don’t rightly know.” The vole quavered as he shut his eyes, certain that something unpleasant was about to befall him, probably involving chives.

Fortunately, they were interrupted by a new, unfamiliar voice. The voice said this: “I can take you to them.”

The vole opened his eyes to behold a waspish figure dressed in a three-piece, pin-striped suit and a brown duster.

“And who are you?!” demanded the Potato Goddess.

“Dr. John Smith,” was the figure’s reply. “Weight loss consultant to the stars.”
“And you say you know where I can find my Onion Ring?”

“Absolutely. But first… have you considered shedding a few pounds? You’re looking extremely bloated and unattractive. These books on dieting should help.”
********
Jakob, who is ostensibly the star of the novel but who hasn’t actually appeared for three chapters, had meanwhile decided that the best course of action at the present time would be to curl up into a ball in a dark and filthy corner of Vlad’s garage and wait to die, since nothing else he ever tried to accomplish had worked out very well for him.

“Get up, Jakob.”

Jakob peeked one red-rimmed eye out from the cocoon formed by his hirsute arms to identify the speaker.
“Oh, it’s you again.”

“Ah, I take it that, in your timeline, we’ve met before,” said Dr. John Smith. “Good, then there’s no need for introductions. Now, get up. We have serious matters to discuss.”

“Lemme alone,” muttered Jakob.

“Ðámņ it, Jakob, stop being a mopey emo-boy and get up!”

He got up. Only Bela could have that effect on him. Or possibly Woeisme, who stood beside her mother looking equally annoyed.

“What’s going on?” he asked nobody in particular.

“I’ll explain everything as soon as…” Dr. Smith began. He stopped as the sound of footsteps emanated from a dark cave tunnel and Edwood and Something emerged, blinking in the harsh light of the garage’s fluorescent bulbs.

“What the hëll?” was Something’s response upon discovering the assembled quartet, in lieu of the magical Frito he had expected to find. Edwood’s response was rather different, and consisted merely of a barely perceptible exhalation of air and an exquisitely calculated sweep of his right hand against a stray lock of his bangs.

“Ah, good, you’re here,” said Dr. Smith. “Don’t bother looking for the Corn Chip of Courage. It doesn’t exist. At least, not yet.”

“But…”

Dr. Smith held up a hand. “Before I explain what you’re all doing here, I believe it necessary for me to tell you a story.

He paused to make sure he had everyone’s full attention.

“Bela, put the lip gloss away and pay attention. Now then, this story begins in Ireland in the 1840s. There was a young man named John O’Hara, who had recently returned from travels abroad with a new wife in tow. And a most beautiful wife she was, with luscious red lips and glistening russet hair. Her name… was Santora.”

“Santora!”

“No interruptions, please, Jakob. Now, it wasn’t until he had brought her home to Ireland that John O’Hara discovered that his new bride was a werewolf. And not just any werewolf, but the deadliest and most feared werewolf in Europe. You see, there’s a phenomenon common to female werewolves, which occurs when both of their monthly cycles coincide in such a way as to produce, shall we say, one extremely irritable and ill-tempered wolf.”

Jakob knew exactly what he was talking about, having endured it many times from his mother. Nowadays, those in the werewolf community referred it as the Perfect Storm. The Perfect Monster Storm.

“By a strange fluke of nature, Santora’s monthly cycles were in perfect synchronization with each other, so that she experienced this unfortunate condition every time there was a full moon. The result was a werewolf driven nearly mad from the monthly cramps and bloating and hormonal imbalance. John very probably would not have survived his first year of marriage, had he not found a treatment for her condition. You see, he found that a large helping of baked potatoes was the only thing that could assuage her symptoms. Of course, we now know this was due to the high content of vitamin B6, but obviously he would have no way of knowing that in the 19th Century.

“Anyway, Santora soon began craving baked potatoes insatiably, until eventually she would eat nothing else. With her husband’s help, she scoured the Irish countryside, gobbling up every potato she could find until there was nothing left. A disease was blamed on the loss of the potato crop, but the potato farmers knew better.

“With Ireland virtually emptied of potatoes, the O’Haras returned to the Continent, where Santora began her feast anew. Fortunately, I came across them on one of my jaunts through time, and was able to convince them to hold off on their potato holocaust until I could find an alternative means of sating Santora’s hunger.

“And find one, I did. Using advanced 40th Century technology, I attempted to devise a means to transmute matter, any matter at all, into an ingestible potato form. Unfortunately, I had little grasp of the technology I was attempting to wield, and I ended up achieving the opposite of my goal. The potato I used as a template became wildly unstable at a molecular level and began altering its chemistry at random, transforming into stone and water and so forth until it began achieving ever more complex forms, such as machines and organisms. It could also replicate itself, so I often had to deal with not one but dozens of shapeshifting potatoes. It eventually achieved sentience, and began to stabilize itself only after it had taken the form of a human baby.

“The baby grew to adulthood in a matter of days, and disappeared shortly thereafter. Or so it seemed. I later learned that he had killed John and taken his place as Santora’s husband. He was in love with her, you see, deeply, obsessively in love with her. She became pregnant by him, and after a pregnancy that lasted only a few hours, she gave birth to triplets. That is, if you can call what happened “giving birth.” The shapeshifting infants, impatient to be free of the womb, clawed their way out through her belly, killing her almost instantly.

“The potato man, who had begun calling himself El Patata, was driven insane by the loss of his beloved Santora, and vowed to destroy the three children responsible. Hastily, I swept up the three infants and took them with me as I left that time period. I reasoned that the only way to protect them was to separate them and spread them out across time and space, and find them homes where they would be accepted. One of them, I brought to Spain in the early 20th Century, and left him in the care of a family of vampires, the Mendozas. He grew up to be a famous bullfighter, and made a considerable fortune fighting himself in the ring as both matador and bull. Unfortunately, his exploits soon reached the ears of the immortal El Patata, who deduced his true nature and killed him in the ring in front of an audience of thousands.

“The second child I took to Colorado in the 1880s, and placed him in the care of the Chaney family. He would grow up to achieve fame as an actor, the so-called Man of a Thousand Faces. He eventually retired that persona and began expanding his repertoire, becoming a thespian of, as you might imagine, considerable skill and range. He now variously goes by the names of Jack Nicholson, Johnny Depp, Denzel Washington, Chow Yun-Fat, and Florence Henderson.”

“Florence Henderson?”

“He has… issues.

“As for the third child, I took him to Ohio in the 1980s, and gave him to a family of werewolves… the Blaqs.”

“That’s racist!” declared Bela. “If they were white you wouldn’t call them “the Whites”!

“He means me, you idiot,” interjected Jakob. He turned to Dr. Smith. “So you’re saying I’m half werewolf, half… potato?”

“Precisely. I lost track of you when your family moved to Washington. I became aware of your current situation only after I was called upon, in my duties as a protector of the timeline, to return Dan Quayle and Michael Dukakis to their proper eras. It was only after I had done so that I realized that their respective time periods already had a Quayle and a Dukakis. It didn’t take me long to figure out that they were not time-displaced after all, that in fact they weren’t the true Quayle and Dukakis at all.”

“Who were they?” Jakob asked, already suspecting the answer.

“Isn’t it obvious? They were you.”

“But how is that possible?”

“Well, surely you’re already aware of your ability to assume multiple forms at one time. I believe you transformed into a pair of penguins?”

“Well, yeah, but why would I want to be Dan Quayle or Michael Dukakis?”

“It’s not so much a question of want. At present, your shapeshifting ability is governed mostly by your subconscious, in much the same way as your dreams are. Your abilities simply make your dreams, literally, come true. But it has taken a heavy toll on your psyche. You have, for all intents and purposes, a severe multiple personality disorder. This is why your mind is so fractured, why you have trouble making even the simplest of decisions. It’s why you have so much trouble choosing between Bela, the object of your obsession; Woeisme, the object of your infatuation; and Edwood, the object of your emulation, and the only one of the three who is actually in love with you.”

“Wait, what?”

“And your indecision, in turn, compels your subconscious to create these avatars. Your obsession with Bela, and her rejection of you, is what finally broke the dam. Without Bela, you began fixating on Woeisme. And what did you do? You created the identity of a king, a Potatoe King, to woo her and make her a queen. Your brain already associated potatoes with Dan Quayle, so that’s the form the Potatoe King eventually adopted. When Edwood mentioned lobsters and Massachusetts, that triggered a response in one of your alternate personas, who for days had been stalking Bela at Sullen Manor.”

“Wait, what?”

“Not now, Bela. This duplicate thus became Dukakis. And so on. Yukon Gold, who represented your obsession with Bela. Ðìçk Cheney, who was your living avatar of self-loathing. When you began having thoughts of doing something terrible to Edwood, you created Dr. Terrible.”

“Wait, what?”

“Not now, Edwood!”

“No, I mean I thought Dr. Terrible was Bela’s gynecologist.”

“Well,” replied Bela, “I thought he could have been my gynecologist. You don’t think I’d ever look my gynecologist in the face, do you? Or bother to remember his name? Come to think of it, why would I go to a gynecologist named Dr. Terrible?”

“Yes, being your gynecologist was just another sick fantasy conjured up by Jakob’s mind.”

“Hey!”

“Oh, be quiet, Jakob. So, there you have it. Virtually everyone you’ve met over the course of the past few days has been a product of Jakob’s mind and his obsession with potatoes and film and television characters.”

“That’s true,” Bela interrupted, “he watches way too much TV. He even thought he was a character on Lost for a while.”

“Yes. He was even able to win Woeisme’s heart by creating Fig, only to, ironically, become his own rival for her affections.”

“Wait, Fig’s not real?”

“Sadly, no, Woeisme. Didn’t it strike you as odd that he became a ghost, and then flesh and blood again, and then a Circus Peanut? Of course, you didn’t notice that the Potato Goddess disappeared and was replaced by Bela, either.”

“Wait, so the Bela who found the Onion Ring of Power wasn’t the real Bela?”

“Good heavens, no! Did you really think there was such a thing as an Onion Ring of Power? This Bela was a vampire that your mind conjured up to take the place of the real Bela who had spurned you. She used her vampiric powers of hypnosis to make everyone love her in the same way that Edwood has been doing to the real Bela for years.”

“Wait, what?”

“Later, Bela! For now, we must round up the false Bela and all of your other stray alternates. I’ve already collected a few myself, and have kept them in the Oven until Jakob can re-absorb them.”

“The Oven?”

“Oh, that’s what I call my time machine.”

“Why, because it’s where the bread of time rises?” Woeisme had learned about metaphor in school and was eager to try one out.

“No, it just gets terribly hot in there in summer. No air conditioning.”

“But how do we know who is really me and who isn’t?” inquired Jakob.

“You won’t. I, however, have devised a test to make this determination. Since there is no way to tell, biologically, who is one of your avatars, I’ve devised a psychological test that plays upon their innate indecisiveness by presenting them with several contradictory options that are all of equal value but also of equal unimportance. Through trial and error, I’ve found that the best sources for this kind of decision are the opening moves in a game of checkers, and a stack of those fad diet books that are currently sweeping the nation.”

“Fad… diet books?” Woeisme barely managed to say.

She looked at her mother, her father, and finally at Jakob, who didn’t need to see the tears pooling in her eyes to know what she was thinking. It was the same thing he was thinking: if Dr. Smith had given her the diet books, it meant he had reason to suspect that… Edwood might not be her father after all.

Without another word, Woeisme flew up through the skylight and disappeared from sight.

“What’s wrong with Woeisme?” asked Dr, Smith. “Did she… I have to ask: who is her father?”

Bela looked at Edwood, but he refused to return her gaze. “I… I honestly don’t know.”

“Very well. We’ll have to find her and give her these books.”

“Can’t you just use your time machine to go back to a time when you know she’ll be home?”

“I don’t like doing that, but under the circumstances… very well. But before I go, perhaps you can clear up one thing for me that I don’t understand: why on earth would you name your son Something?”

“We didn’t,” replied Edwood. He looked to his son. “You want to explain it?”

“Well, you see,” began Something, “I don’t know if you know this about me, but I’m the emperor of this other-dimensional fantasy world called Fantasmica – don’t ask, it’s a whole other long, interminable story – and I needed a new name or else Fantasmica would be destroyed. The only one who could name me was this human kid named… oh, what was his name? Something like… Bášŧárd? We’ll just call him Bášŧárd. So Bášŧárd couldn’t decide on a name, wasn’t even sure he believed that he was the one with this power, so, with my kingdom falling apart around my ears, I finally yelled at him, ‘Ðámņ it, Bášŧárd, just name me something!’ He… misunderstood. And now I’m stuck with this name or else Fantasmica will be destroyed.”

He paused for a moment, as if in deep thought. “God, I hate that Bášŧárd.”

“Right,” said Dr. Smith, “Off I go.”

Jakob, remembering their last/next encounter, blurted out, “You can find Woeisme Monday morning around 7:00, outside Sullen Manor.”

“Ah, yes, thank you. Meanwhile, I hope you all can put aside your differences and help Jakob find his lost selves and stop El Patata from exacting revenge on him and his brother Jack… Denzel… whatever.”

Bela merely stood with her arms crossed, glaring maliciously at Jakob and Edwood. Edwood, who had once heard of something called “emotions” and was interested in trying it out, stood with his arms crossed, glaring maliciously at Jakob and Bela. Something stood with his arms crossed and simply muttered to himself, evidently still worked up about Bášŧárd.

“Excellent!” proclaimed Dr. Smith.

Jakob sheepishly turned to the others. “So, where do we go from…”

He was rendered unable to continue by Bela’s fist slamming into his face. He collapsed at her feet.

“Dr. Smith!” she shouted at the departing doctor. “When you see Jakob, tell him he’s a bad wolf!”

“I’m right here!” Jakob interjected.

“Yeah, well, you can’t hear it often enough.”

“Oh, dear,” came the doctor’s voice from the other end of the garage, “I really should have taken the Potato Goddess and the voles out of the Oven. I’m afraid they’ve been… baked.”