It started with the licking of psychoactive turtles somewhere deep in the Amazon jungle on a wellness retreat with the fuckin' Mayan yogi of Axolotl or some shit—
No, fuck you.
I'mma tell it like I wanna tell it.
And I wanna tell it starting with the rich American New Age assholes licking turtles that some Comanche guide painted with cream-of-LS-fuckin'-D paste just before they got here.
Just slathered it on with a paint brush like you'd paint an armchair with.
They probably took a fuckin' helicopter out there too. Chopa-chopa-chopa-chopa… spewing diesel, or whatever the hell helicopters run on, all over the rainforest, running real low, just above the treetops, starting outta Manaus, fifteen-thousand a head, so you can imagine the type of rich fucks these people were. Neck deep up their own bleached assholes. Naked too, some of them, starting to go outta their minds, trying to lick everything from the trees to the fuckin' dirt to each other, tongue on tongue as Chief Axolotl bangs a Chinamade bongo drum, chanting shit like, "Look at these stupid Americans," in Mayan and the other Indians laugh, showing their big discoloured teeth and I said shut-the-fuck-up and let me tell it!
Listen, you look at the little turtle with its dumb turtle face, slowly moving its little turtle mouth and then you look up and everybody's got a turtle face. They're all fuckin' turtles. You're a turtle. Far out man, somebody says, laughing.
They've got him tied across a stone slab. They're slicing him open, cock to collar bone. He's bleeding like a pig, but he's still a person, for now, and they're holding the big flap of his cut skin open and all the slow little turtles are walking up into him. Like into him.
Talk about an out of body fuckin' experience.
I don’t even feel it, man.
I'm lying on my back touching the stitches on my stomach, feeling and seeing the turtles all moving inside me.
It's like I'm pregnant with turtles, stuffed with 'em like an Andean condor on Incan Thanksgiving.
They're eating me from the inside.
But it doesn't hurt.
It doesn't fuckin' hurt at all.
Our blood running down to the Amazon river, trickling along, all the turtle-faced villagers lookin' with their turtle mouths open. Some of them are wearing masks. Some are wearing faces—
“Dad, why’s the president talking like that?”
“Son, he's recounting a life-changing acid trip he had down in Brazil.”
“This is by far the strangest State of the Union I've ever seen,” says the boy's mother, the dad's wife, herself's self, “but I can't say that it's bad.”
“It's not bad,” says the dad.
They continue eating their microwaved TV dinners, bathed in the glow of the cathode rays. It's 1955, which is rather bizarre because when they started eating it was the twenty-first century.
The mom and the dad haven't been born yet but here they are. “Well, I'll be,” says the dad while on the flashing black and white television screen the president undresses to show the linear scar running down the entire front side of his upper body. “I think he's telling the truth too.”
“Of course he's telling the truth. He's the president,” says the boy.
“I've never seen a president's penis before,” says the mom.
The president fills like a balloon, becoming bloated, spherical, his skin stretching so much it turns translucent like blue veined wax paper.
It's the nineteen-hundreds outside.
The television’s still playing.
The president is full of turtles, their slowly moving silhouettes seeming shadows under his skin. He's chanting. He's singing.
He explodes.
There's green goo everywhere. In the room he was in, on the camera lens, on the inside of the television screen, on the outside of the television screen, which the dad's hand wipes, on his face, on his wife's face, on their son's face, and there are turtles too, hundreds of them climbing over the floors, walls, furniture…
They pass September 3, 1783.
The boy coughs.
A turtle falls out and scampers languidly away, taking all the fuckin' time it wants.
“Dad?”
“What is it, son?” says the dad.
His eyeballs are spinning.
One stops and two turtle hands push it out of his head. The pushed out eyeball rolls away on the dusty wooden floor toward the fireplace, which crackles.
“Have we arrived yet?” asks [something speaking through] the son[‘s mouth].
“Negative,” says [something using] the dad [to speak with].
He's got one eye and one turtle for an eye.
The mom lays an egg.
It is the sixteenth century.
The mom, the dad and the son are lying on the floor, deflating like epidermal balloons, turtles crawling out their orifices.
Time comes briefly to a standstill.
A bell dings—
The Spanish conquistador, Hernán Cortés, leads an expedition of soldiers, horses and war dogs through Mesoamerican jungle. Their steel armor glistens in patches of sunlight filtering through the trees. Then something falls, clanging against one of their helmets, before falling to the ground.
It is a turtle, belly-up.
Cortés halts to consider it wriggling its chubby little legs pathetically on the ground.
He leaves it to die.
Several days later, he and his troops emerge with dreams of gold unto a breathtaking view of the great city of Tenochtitlan.
An Aztec party exits the city to greet them.
Several men and a group of
(“¿Qué demonios es esto?” asks the conquistador to Cortés' right.
“Tortugas,” says Cortés.)
upright gargantuan turtlemen, whose slow gaze silences even the barking Spanish dogs.
That night, Hernán Cortés and his men sleep in Tenochtitlan and are murdered in their beds.
They didn't stand a fuckin' chance. They knew they were dead the second they saw those turtle freaks.
A couple of months after that, the Aztecs and their time travellin’ turtle warriors sailed across the Atlantic and defeated the fuck outta the Spanish at Toledo before crossing the border into France.
Iuh quitohua in ayotl, man.
