Five good minutes (a.) “It’s a classic case of does the body control the mind or does the mind control the body, dickless.”

Four minutes left to idle until Graham Sheldon’s class and fourth hour and two more hours of dodging the Varsity Elite and hoisting Jebediah Noelle out of the shitter and dodging a very corpulent Bev Pinesol who, since seeing David Hale perform buff in the annual Autumnal streak has been seen wearing an I Heart Female Orgasms tee-shirt beneath her standard parachute in stature commodious apron bib. Two hours until Patrick is allocated his fifteen minutes of gaming with Von Behren and Hale on the top rungs of the Yellow Monkeys Bars where last week Von Behren engendered a campaign for Juggy and Wolvie where they had an opportunity to brutally annihilate Death Shredder and his toady sidekick simply named Budd. SideArms had warned previously how simply, if possible, to try to capture and retain the core nemesis of Patrick’s creation, but the moment Wolvie and Juggernaut had Death Shredder cornered, Wolverine’s adamantium talons screeching from his knuckles accompanied by the cha-ching voice over Patrick always gives his character so that it reminds Von Behren of a cash register opening and closing—the exact moment Wolverine looks Shredder into the pupils of his adversaries eyelids and simply tells the boon of his immortal hatred to die fucker, Wolverine feels a thick gash in the middle of his Adams apple and little squirts of blood erupting in front his own neck in sharp pulsating motions and Wolverine’s eyesight is near-sighted and hazy but somehow Wolverine, through the pain, is capable of perceiving the contours of his own visage—his voice fraught with atavistic hatred and rage, letting lose of a high-pitched din feral coated caterwaul, Wolverine feels, through the searing grit of pain that he is looking into a mirror at his own reflection through Shredders' perspective—looking at himself the moment he usurps the pulse of another creature, the look of greed seeded under his eyebrows as he pushes his steel talons  further into the neck of Death Shredder and mouths out the words die and fucker in what seems like one collected syllable, and Wolverine, all the while that he is seeing himself perform this gruesome act of crucifying his own enemy feels the blood and air empty himself in the back his own neck, blood now trickling out the roof of his mouth and his chin like freshly laid carpet that was suddenly stripped with blood dripping off into his chin and effusing down into the armored canvas of his chest and the next thing Wolverine realizes is that, somehow in the terse one-thousandth of a second that it took him to release his claws and wedge them deeply into the neck of Shredder going for the kill—that somehow, he realizes, as the lights around him seems to turn up side down and his vision thrusts open and close like his imminent field of vision, namely that of his own countenance has somehow been painted onto an umbrella  at close range and the fabric was being open and closed in front of him and breath was something that tasted of his own blood which is Shredders' blood in Shredders mouth leaving Wolverine with the last ditch momentary realization that Shredder had somehow used his powers to transmogrify himself and more or less switch corporeal body armor with Wolverine, so that when Wolverine went for the demolishing kill, slashing his talons through the neck of his most heated adversary, he was actually killing himself, ending his own existence with all things leading to a blanket of veiled light falling over Patrick’s imaginative eyesight like a feather so that himself paradoxically killing himself is the last image he shall see. Patrick keens out the word SHIT!!! on the top of the Yellow Monkey Bars that afternoon in a manner that suggested he was in no way-shape-form talking about one of Von Behren’s Surrogate duplicates. Hale looks at Patrick reminding him that SideArms did warn him not to kill Death Shredder and all Wolverine could do was just to go right on ahead and be impulsive as fuck. Now Juggernaut was left in the portal tying sycophant Budd’s arms into a human pretzel, taking him back to air city for further probes which, Juggy adds, his gay-wad ass has probably been anticipating since Mardi Gras last year in Key West. Von Behren keeps a Trapper Keeper with a picture of a topless Rogue on the cover like a crest with Juliet Roberts' visage superseded over comic book Rogue's own face—stating a long running argument between Patrick and GM warlord down the street Tim Flanagan that yes indeed Juliet Robert would make a good Rogue. Because the monkey bars overlook a mulchy heap of earth, Von Behren takes the Trapper Keeper, laying it on top as a bridge connecting the two arched parabolic rungs, thus employing the trapper keeper to serve as a makeshift table to roll the two pair of ten sided dice across.  Just as Patrick rolls emergency doubles to see if his character lives (using the Hero Points of Shredders body).his roll fails, comes up short. Patrick utters out the word fuck in a fashion which suggests that it can’t possibly mean anything else ‘cept for an acronym of lost and despair.   Hale on the other hand,is accepting a victory stogie from a Shredder clad in Wolvies clothing while tossing the NPC Budd up in the air like a beach ball. Von Behren rolling the dice in all fairness trying to roll the doubles high enough so that Hale’s doppleganger, the almighty Juggernaut, may hint that something is wrong, but that roll, too, comes up, a few sibling appliances short of as happy household.

 

“So, Dave, like, what do I do…”

 

“Yer dead bro, I mean…your body is still alive but your soul has flown the coop and barreled inside the slaughterhouse so to speak."

 

            “So I’m not still alive?” Patrick inquires, as Von Behren tells him that the only thing Wolverine can perceive is a gentle coat of fresh black paint cosigning eternal nothingness.

 

            “ Shredder is inhabiting your body, hence, your body is still alive although your soul is dead. It’s the complete opposite of what they teach us here.”

 

            Patrick sighs. Hale says enough with the discourse into metempsychosis people, Shredder is dead, let’s get shitfaced. From across the polar arched rung of the monkey bars Patrick starts to say that wait, there should be no cause for celebration. He’s dead. I mean, he’s not dead dead but his soul is gone. How he perceives the world has completely been yanked from under his perspective and corporeal point of view like a magician swiping a linen cover off of a table without upsetting the configuration of delft china in the slightest.

 

  “Dave,” Patrick goes on, feeling that Von Behren is acting more like his friend Tim. “I can’t be dead. I mean, my fucking body is still alive. I still have adamantium laced to the interior of my claws and skeleton. The monotone and lilt to my voice is still exactly. My blood type and eye-color and finger prints are still exactly the same.”

 

“Dude,” Hale says sounding almost a tad bit like Baker, “You are DEAD!” The word dead trumpets out of Hale’s lips with the deep thudding vibrato of a timpani. Patrick’s mouth leaks open agape, as if he can’t believe just what the fuck is going on as Von Behren blathers on about Shredder’s character sheet as a last ditch defense embedded into the lining of his titanium armor so that in a death situation, the moment where the individual becomes paralyzed with the fleecing realization that there is nothing that comes after this moment, Shredder is then capable of projecting everything that is laced inside his spirit into that of another fleshy tuxedo--especially if that nearby cloth of epidermis and cells just so happens to be his assassin.  

 

Patrick then began to contest Von Behren’s annoying metaphysical shenanigans.

 

“But then if his spirit has a soul, that means mine must have a soul. And my soul must be out there dangling somewhere at the golden welcome matt, waiting for old St. Peter to go ahead and wave me in with cha-ching sounds.”

 

“Sorry, bro. You no longer exist. Your soul got teleported inside the skin of Shredder right at the exact moment you were killing him. Sidey tried telling you to take him prisoner but you had to go right ahead and slaughter his ass.”

 

“But Dave,” Patrick pleads, stampeding his foot up and down on the rung below him.

 

“But what,” Von Behren retorts, raising his voice as if asking a rhetorical question back into Patrick's furrowed brow  while Hale continues to rant on in the background that now that everything purportedly gallant and purported true which Wolverine has stood for is officially “dead, ” he plans on having Juggernaut bonk the hell out of Jasmine, Wolverine's current suerpheroic femme fatal. When Patrick points out that Juggernaut can’t bonk the hell out of Jasmine because he is currently bonking the hell out of and engaged to Maxima, Hale comments out loud then fine, he’ll have his other character, an 80 year old warlock magician named Orgon, go ahead and bonk the hell out of Jasmine as well.

 

“Dead,” Gulps Patrick, looking at Von Berhen with his mouth shaped like a train tunnel, a wedged feeling of tangible lost bobbing in his chest like the time the Garcia clown clan next door inadvertently flattened Patrick’s escaped camouflaged dyed hamster Kissinger with their Zambroni and knocked on the door of casa McReynolds and held it up in front of Warren, who answered the door with a musket in paw, Horatio Garcia holding Kissinger up to Warren's face like a hypnotist endeavoring to seduce his prey with a dangling pocket watch and Patrick, coming down the steps, to see what all the fuss is about, bursting out into a stream of salty tears when he discerned that his escaped pet Kissinger, whose fur he got a letter from Peta about when he tried publishing his hamster reconnaissance camouflage findings in Boys' Life—that his pet was now extinguished—no more—gone.

 

Patrick is feeling that wallowing feeling of palpable loss in his throat right now. It is almost like choking on air after holding your breath under water for two minutes during free swim. Hale seems to be oblivious that what Wolverine really is is dead. Celebrating with Shredder so it seems, about the death of Wolverine, even thought to Hale it feels like he is paradoxically celebrating with Wolverine about the demise of their hard fought adversary.

 

Patrick looks down into the voluptuous cleavage of Rogue inserted into the cover of Von Behren’s Trapper Keeper and wishes he could deeply tuck his actual head burrowed between each of her individual breasts for a long time to come.

 

Warren then accused Horatio Garcia of purposefully running over the sixth member of his sweet innocent family Michael Collins Kissinger McReynolds with that fucked up not worth two-shits Zambroni of his, and, somehow akin to the manner in which Patrick just now released his steel talons and into the neck of Shredder without first previously heeding the advice of Col Sidey who generally (since he is Von Behren’s character) runs the show and sometimes leaves picayune hints about what may or may not be transpiring that Patrick sometimes ardently wishes Von B would make more overt at times. Warren hoisted the musket up to dead hamster brandishing Horatio Garcia’s adam’s apple and, germane to Wolverine’s rash assertion, got trigger happy and clicked the trigger in one swift motion. What Warren somehow forgot was that the musket has previously belonged to the Garcia Clan—Warren, picking it up on one of his reconnoitering missions over to the Garcia property to give the three-ring circus act next door a piece of his mind after an errant Boomerang Bowling Pin shattered underneath the neon flickering light of the Guests' First sign shortly after Warren had it installed so that, at the moment Warren’s curved pointer finger bit in to the conversely inward curved toe-nail clipping shaped trigger in a spontaneous and impetuous manner the nozzle made a severe farting sound before sprinkling Horation Garcia himself in a drooping constellation display of confetti. 

 

         “Dead,” is all Patrick can say, as he looks across the rungs of the yellow monkeys bars, into Hale and then back into Von Behren, before once again inquiring how can he be dead if his physical stature and anatomy still exist.

 

“Duh,” Hale says, “It’s a classic case of does the body control the mind or does the mind control the body, dickless.”

 

“It has nothing do with either mind or body but that something deeper which harnesses the roots of both of them.” Von Behren adds. Patrick adds a “what,” in lip of his confusion but Von Behren seems not to budge in his intractable assertion that Wolverine is no more.

 

“What made Wolverine Wolverine no longer exists, it’s wavering in some static ether, unaware of its own theosophical whereabouts.”

 

Both Hale and Patrick bust out with a vexing Huh.

 

“It’s no more. The driving pulsating matrix that composed Wolverine’s personal ethos is now void and scattered.”

 

Hale makes out his signature whew-hoo sound, somehow thinking that Von Behren is still talking about Shredder and not Wolverine. Patrick tells Von Behren to quit sounding all Webster dictionary like his ex-girlfriend all the time and just focus on telling a good story—which he is somehow failed to be doing before hawking a serious loogie into the heap of mulch below and catching the sight of Hyacinth (Hollis) Lionoski, surrounded in a geometrical triangle of burgeoning Varsity Elite cheerleaders working on a no-handed cartwheel. Hyacinth takes what appears to be an eight-step all out sprint before contorting her body in a perfect congruent vertical slant, tucking both of her hands into the pit of her arms like breeched wings. Near the entrance of the school Marcellus Buck is surrounded by a media frenzy telling the nikkon-snapping crowd just how bad ass he plans on being this season—both on the court and in the bedroom. Perhaps the only positive thing Coach M has ever informed the Loser lads (as Rev Morningwoods referred to them once on St. Patrick’s day, guzzling Guiness out of a Notre Dame logoed Beerstein reading Fuck me I fucked over the Irish) Coach M, using the word behoove like he just discerned the gender of the word that morning, claiming that it would be-hooved the Losers into clinging on various rungs of the monkey bars when the media is present during recess at CLS and just damn well staying there and not moving and, if possible, pretending that they attend the heathen public grade school academy down the street. Once, Playboy magazine wanted to do an article on the Varsity Elite and shoot them on the rungs of the monkey bars in autumn, a wreath of centerfolds flanking the starting five, the pony-tailed photographer who wore a thick dun-colored life preserver vest that seriously looked that it could stop a bullet at close range suggested that the monkey bars were the opportune spot for the shoot, commenting that there was something verifiable and real about the fifteen foot tower of babel  scooping itself out of the earth like some sort of oxidized bubble. Coach M seemed to take this as a direct insult to the architecture of his academy, publicly claiming that obviously, the fashion fag hasn’t isn’t up to par when it comes to recognizing a bona fide out of this planet mini-golf course when he sees one. That was the one recess that Coach M publicly stuttered out near the monkey bars dressed in what looked like a spacesuit Patrick has seen the caretakers of building and grounds clad in to clean out the asbestos in Calvin Coolidge down the street. Coach M, clumsily attired in a white bubble with feet, brandishing a bottle of windex, informing Von Behren and Patrick and Hale to get their warty bacteria-ridden germs off of school property, it needs to be properly disinfected for the shoot later this afternoon. Coach M began furiously dusting away while the three lads were escorted into the 50’s gymnasium for the remainder of the afternoon—Patrick, taking out his thoroughly pent up pissed off aggression out, by swinging a v-sole wedge Dedalus Driver over hole 13, which is a five-foot high replica of splayed arm Coach M, shaped a la stature of Christ over Rio, only the surrounding neon is dotted with replica’s of CLS itself, a miniaturized version of the academy which keeps on growing like mold, Christ Church across the street, all serving as brick obstacles for the hole, which is located near Coach M’s sandals, in what appears to be an aerial view of Logan field. Patrick kept pretending that he is in a batting cage, swinging the Dedalus Driver perilously close to Coach M’s angular nose, until supervisor Rudolph Theske told him to cut that out, saying the way to properly vent ones anger is to pretend that the golf ball is shaped like Satan himself and gently saying getting behind me Satan like a round before putting.

 

“So that’s it?” Patrick inquires, back on the Monkey Bars, still wondering what the hell is going on with his creation. “Wolvies dead?” Von Behren sounds uncannily like Tim when he responds with a more or less, yes. From the opposite rung, the side close to the trapper keeper with a topless picture of Rogue Hale begins to insinuate himself into the conversation, saying that he would just so happen to like his octogenarian creation Orgon into Jasmines room to tell her the bad news about Wolvie while handing her a bushel of roses and giving her a little wink-wink nod-nod at the same time.

 

“But to Jasmine Wolverines not dead,” notes Patrick, she doesn’t know.

 

“You are exactly right. His body still exists. Everything people think about him still exists, except for that inscrutable breath of ethics and identity constituting onces persona. One's own unique view of the world.”

 

Hale asks doesn't this mean deep shit for our little Cadre since Shredder guised in Wolverine hiide can pretty much get access to everything valuable  in Air City. Patrick remembers Von Berhen saying that day, on the yellow monkey bars that how a lot of people seemed to be already what he called DOA or Dead on Arrival and that, look all around at CLS, what CLS purports—the spiritual odyssey and undertaking of erecting an institution under the spiritual aegis of a purported living God—and one who is purportedly both inherently wrathful and incumbently loving at the same time. Von Behren then continued on with his philosophical antics urging both Hale and Patrick (and somehow Juggernaut and a black-out soul wavering Wolverine) to take a serious gander around at their own corner of the known universe for just a second and look around and ask themselves the question if they are more or less alive—living the life they seem to be leading, if they feel alive at all times, and then stating over the scalped top rung of the yellow monkey bars to both Patrick and Hale to look at the Academy CLS, that the real reason Coach M keeps on milking the pockets of the congregation and the non-Varsity Elite students for all they are worth is because all he is endeavoring to create is his own coffin—that the sarcophagus on the door that coach M claimed to have “borrowed” from the British Museum of Anthropology all of a decade  ago, claiming that the heirglyphic jargon etched into the front of the gates were really some kind of  portent to a vessel that would be burried someday only to be reborn.

 

 

Patrick looks up into the hallway, heading for the Café Hemlock, thinking perhaps a Fuckochino could work wonders on his brain right now, reminiscing over that day two years ago with Von Behren on the Yellow Monkey Bars, thinking how Von Behren’s voice, which in a way sounded kind of like SideArms, was ringing some sort of latent alarm clock inside Patrick’s interior nervous system, waking him up to certain spiritual tautologies, waking him up to fucking reality in a way by stating that Wolverine, the imaginative culmination of everything Patrick has ever wanted to achieve in his life—was all of a sudden dead, not around, not able to intuit the earth through his own acute sight of smell and vision and taste—and yet his body was still around, being inhabited by the sole adversary—the nemesis whom Patrick has spent the last six months plotting devious ways to more or less annihilate—that creature, now inhabiting his skin—fucking Jasmine, the imaginary love of his life, whose porcelain blue-willow chipped countenance has, as Von Behren’s infinite adventures continue to perambulate across the spring meadows of their imaginations—it was at this moment, some part of Patrick’s body that wasn’t visible on the exterior hairy coating of his eleven year old skin nor found in the blueprint screen of an ex-ray machine—at this moment Patrick realized that Von Behren wasn’t just talking about Wolverine, but rather about Patrick’s existence as a whole at CLS—how he walks around with his future and his talents being shit upon by the Varsity Elite—how he walks around hoping for growth and a chance to making something of himself and he succumbs to the stunting tyrannical whims of Coach M and Dr Kennedy Marshal and how the only time he feels free is when he is with Hale and they dip into the adventures Von Berhen weaves for them on the top of the Yellow Monkey bars, the pinnacle of their youthful existence, and how this imaginary capsule of emotions is more real to him than anything he has ever encountered in the so-called real world. Patrick realized all this that day and then he realized that it was he himself who was dead, and that even more right-on-the mark, that he had never really been alive in the first place to begin with.