Francis of the Filth Page 3

  And so it was that Fransiskus was removed from Indonesia at a very young age and transported to Okinawa, where he was to spend the remainder of his adolescent years. There, his name was shortened to ‘Frank’ because the Japanese seemed incapable of pronouncing the ‘siskus’ part of his name, and he was put in a lab working toward various means of Axis domination.

  This enigma of a young man grew to about 180 centimeters tall and developed a well-defined body thanks to chasing monkeys and boars around the lab whenever they escaped (which was often). He would wrestle them to the ground or knock them out, sometimes with the aid of a porcelain sink, a trick he had learned from a Slav. He had a shock of thick black hair which gave him an aura of tremendous virility. He wore silver wire-rimmed glasses upon a nose that had more than once identified him as having Jewish ancestry, an association he vehemently denied. And he always wore the same blue shirt. It had never been washed.

  Frank’s secluded upbringing gave him a peculiar perspective on the world. He tended to see people and events in extremes. He divided folk into ‘creators’ and ‘consumers’, ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’, ‘thinkers’ and ‘dumbasses’ and ‘bullies and their ‘prey’. No-one really sat in between any of these paradigms. People were either one or the other and once they were one, it was virtually impossible to change to the other. Frank saw himself as the consummate creator/leader/thinker/bully in almost any environment he found himself in.

  And then there was his voice. Much has been hypothesized about the raspiness of Frank’s voice and why it came to be so. Some have assumed it to be a purely genetic anomaly. Others are certain it is the result of a bacterial infection caught from any number of the animals he was experimenting on. On occasions, Frank told people that it was from swallowing thumbtacks after losing a bet in a drunken stupor. But the truth of the matter is that for a short stint in Frank’s formative years, he took to singing Christian heavy metal, a phase he quickly grew out of to the relief of everyone in the lab and the local area, but the constant shrieking and growling took its toll on poor Frank’s virgin vocal cords and alas, they never fully recovered.

  Young Frank had interests and ideals that extended way beyond the walls of the lab. He was fascinated with midgets and aliens and black people in Paris. He found unusual dialects from the Congo, Peru and the bowels of South-east Asia to be of particular interest. Rap and opera filled his musical library. And he develop a particular distaste for non-Japanese who attempted to infiltrate Japanese society, professing a knowledge of the culture whilst demonstrating a profound ignorance of it. There were many artisans and thinkers, musicians and poets who inspired him, but none more so than Schrödinger and some guy named Mozart, who down the line would become the ancestor of Fred Durst.

  Biologically speaking, Frank himself was, it turned out, an even more mysterious figure than his filthy origins would suggest. Though dredged up from an Indonesian sewer, DNA testing revealed that he was primarily of Japanese and German extraction. This explained some inherent traits in Frank like his insatiable appetite for takoyaki, sudden bowing and a penchant for rajio taiso early in the morning. On the Kraut side, Frank would immerse himself in bratwurst diets for weeks on end, find secret relief in listening to recordings of the oom-pah-pah bands of Munich, and was without any sense of humor. Yet there were other genetic markers in his DNA that were unidentifiable and it was these which started the rumors and fears amongst his colleagues in the lab.

  There was only one man that Frank answered to in the lab and that was Tsubasa Honda. Honda was a graduate from Tokyo University who excelled in bio-engineering. He originally joined the Imperial army because, nurturing the psychopath within, he wanted to create bio weapons to ‘see what happens with them’. A quietly spoken man, he was once well built, yet now rather rotund as he approached middle age. He almost became a professional baseball player before the war, primarily because smashing things with a bat was marvelous release for someone who was otherwise extremely reserved, yet he quit baseball at the last minute because he didn’t want to give in to a dirty American tradition. When the war came to its fireball end, Honda was offered a job at Soncorp, a position he received with enthusiasm and gratitude as, philosophically, it involved continuing service to the Emperor and, in practical terms, it involved destroying things.

  His relationship to Frank was simple. In awe of Frank’s genius and his moral failures, his job was to leave Frank alone to do the work that he had been specifically employed to do and to question neither the Germans nor the Japanese board of Soncorp about it. In this sense, Honda was the perfect supervisor for Frank: loyal yet without ethics, nationalistic yet without any sense of restraint, and brilliant without any desire to use it for the greater good.

  There were fifteen other employees in the lab to clean and to perform mundane duties but to Frank they were all faceless drudges, as boring as a feminist at a dinner party and about as funny as a fart in church. Yet there was one presence in that facility who stood out to Frank and who become very nearly the sole focus of his attention. His name was Ichiro. Ichiro mattered, not in the sense that he was important or intelligent or helpful. On the contrary, Ichiro was a useless idiot. He was the very antithesis of Frank, the ‘consuming dumbass follower’ type who was the prey for Frank’s inner bully. He was the necessary evil in Frank’s small world and Frank worked him without mind or mercy.

  A little contemptuous man with a basketball head and round glasses, he looked like some kind of bootleg Japanese Harry Potter doll you would win at a second rate carnival. He had ‘kick me’ written all over his fat, poxy face. Simply put, he looked fucking retarded. Ichiro was Frank’s whipping boy, his dog, his right hand wiper. In almost every sense of the word, Ichiro was Frank’s bitch. This explains why Frank never referred to him by the name his mother gave him at his sorry birth, but called him, without exception, Bitchiro. Whenever Frank needed someone to mop up spillage, he called for Bitchiro. Whenever Frank wanted someone to pick up the pieces of a rat, he would bellow for Bitchiro. If he needed a bottle to piss in, Bitchiro would hold it at the ready.

  “Bitchiro hand me the generator.”

  “Bitchiro, pick up that spleen.”

  “Bitchiro, stick that knife into the toaster.”

  With every command Bitchiro would bow and scrape and respond with, “My nama Bitchiro.” And whenever Frank defecated he would watch as his turd was flushed away and say, ‘Goodbye Bitchiro’.

  The laboratory itself was like no other. A perfectly square gray building, it looked like a rundown Japanese public school. There was nothing in its design to please or inspire, save for a few palm trees which grew on the boundaries of the property. Rising up behind it was a mountain range covered in jurassic vegetation and still-unclassified fauna. It teemed with monkeys, boar and habu snakes, yet most of its natural resources remained undiscovered. The building contained three floors, with the top floor at tree top height. Vines and other vegetation ran along the outside wall of the lab, weaving in and out of the windows and ventilation systems which no longer worked. The sultry air was a perfect incubator for all this foliage and a common source of fatigue amongst the employees on any given afternoon.

  The top floor was all Frank’s and he was given unfettered access to complete his tasks. It contained line after line of computers and various other equipment, most of which no-one, other than Frank, knew how to operate. But Frank, with an intellect that itself was fast approaching Singularity, ran them all with ease and with distinction. His preferred fields of research were diverse, including bacteriology, horology, pharmacology, biochemistry, cosmology, endocrinology, spectroscopy, haematology, mycology and of course gelotology. But if there were a pet area of research and design that meant more to Frank than any other, it was radiobiology; that is, the study of the action of ionizing radiation on living things.

  As such, the lab was strewn with cages containing (or which contained) animals of all sizes and kinds. Primates, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects
were all loved equally for their willingness to serve a greater good. Presently, a small newt sat gingerly in the corner of a clear container, occasionally looking up at Frank as its god and scratching its chest. And then there were the rats. Frank hated rats with a passion and found a great pleasure in reserving his most terrifying experiments for them. Some moved about in their confinement with knowing concern while others were no longer able to; and some were no more than organs or appendages on a table.

  On more than one occasion, Frank would tie a rat to three or four pigeons, then release them to the skies. The pigeons would fly off in different directions tugging the rat back and forth in mid-air, the rat would be writhing and screaming, the birds would be scared to death of the noise the rat was making and fly even harder, which made the rat’s screams reach fever pitch and so the circus would go on till it came to it’s grisly demise. Frank would just shrug and chuckle.

  These episodes marked a beginning. Indeed, the socially repressive lab life began to take its toll on Frank. He would drink copious amounts of beer and then abuse the animals in the lab for what he claimed was a node. He would disappear for hours on end in the evenings to go to dog fights, cock fights, bull fights and midget boxing. He would drunkenly harass the hookers in the red light district, yelling ‘I got Molly, I got white!” and “Gang gang, free my nigger guwop” while being dragged away by the police and/or the off-base U.S military. In short, while Frank was a genius and a biological phenomena, his environment was making him filthy.

  Yet the greater change was from within. Frank had been pouring his heart and soul into radiobiology, and all the while unwittingly, he poured radiobiology into his genetic vulnerabilities. The interaction of radiation on the unknown genetic markers in Frank’s DNA brought about changes which Frank could never have imagined; dark changes; menacing changes; changes that reached far further than Frank could ever have imagined. At first it was just aches and pains, but then his urine turned orange and he began to have hallucinations - sometimes happy, sometimes terrible, always weird. Aware of these changes, Frank decided to secretly test himself, certain that he now had some form - or forms - of cancer.

  It was not without fear then, that he lay the syringe on the table, sterilized his arm with a swab of alcohol and slapped his skin to bring up the veins. On finding the best one, he slipped the needle in and watched the red essence fill the test tube. He filled a second just in case. Before the blood on his arm had dried, he had the sample mixed with testing solutions and placed under a microscope. There, to his horror, he watched nucleic acids behave in a way that he had never seen before. They were wriggling - writhing - and then pulling apart as though in self-rejection, before completely splitting down the middle, a process which appeared to be repeating ad infinitum. This discovery made cancer look like the common cold. With cancer, the cells multiply uncontrollably. With Frank, his chromosomes were now multiplying uncontrollably. He was, in effect, becoming an entirely new species. He continued to look into the eyepiece wondering - hoping - that this was another hallucination.

  He called his little rodent friend over to confirm the findings.

  “Bitchiro! Get over here!” He was in front of Frank immediately. “Look into this microscope and tell me what you see.”

  “My nama Bitchiro.”

  “Well, what do you see? Don’t hold back. Tell me everything.”

  The simpleton began to sweat and look decidedly nervous. “My nama Bitchiro.”

  “So you see it, too?” Frank asked. “You see the chromosomes multiplying?”

  Bitchiro could no longer control his bladder. “My nama Bitchiro. My nama Bitchiro.”

  Frank turned away in distress for a moment, then looked back to his underling and held out a stern finger.

  “No-one hears about this, Bitchiro. You got that? No-one is to know.”

  “My nama Bitchiro.”

  “If anyone - anyone at all - gets wind of this, I will stew you up and serve you with fries while you’re still breathing!”

  “My nama Bitchiro.”

  “Now what are you still doing here?! Piss off!”

  The weasel scampered off with one last “My nama Bitchiro.”

  Frank diligently took samplings every morning and evening and kept daily notes on the progress of his condition. What he failed to do, however, primarily because he just didn’t care, was test Bitchiro who had also been regularly exposed to the uranium.

  “Bitchiro, bring me that sea cucumber,” he called to him one fine morning.

  “My nama Bitchiro.”

  Frank looked at his little dolt as he held the dripping echinoderm in his trembling hands. Bitchiro looked different this morning. He had an aura of greater patheticness, greater nervousness, as though he was expecting to be beaten far greater than he had ever been beaten before. Frank enjoyed this enormously.

  “My nama B…”

  “What?” said Frank. “Spit it out, boy.”

  “My nama B…”

  “What in the name of scat is wrong with you?”

  “My nama…” and before he could get any more out, his head jerked back in such a violent manner, the crack in his neck could be heard down on the second floor. With a sound like the branch of a tree breaking, his jaw and mouth ripped apart with such incredible force that the crown of his head began to split open. There was momentary resistance before Bitchiro’s entire body from his head down to the base of his torso ripped in two and a new naked and slimy Bitchiro emerged, slithering out of what was now a crumpled carcass lying on the floor.

  “Hmmh,” said Frank. “Cool.” He then turned to continue on his own testing.

  “My nama Bitchiro,” said this new Bitchiro, identical to the previous one though still covered in a thick slime.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Frank. “Now piss off.”

  This metamorphosis was not a singular event. In fact, Bitchiro fast fell into a natural routine of excruciating death and slimy rebirth once a week or so and Frank, more amused than concerned in any way at all, would take fastidious notes each time it happened. His concern remained more for himself. He knew that he and Bitchiro were changing, the only difference was that no-one cared about Bitchiro. And as soon as Bitchiro had completed a metamorphosis, Frank would tell him to hurry and clean up the mess he had made on the floor and to incinerate the putrid carcass that he always left behind.

  Chapter 3

  All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Frank was beginning to get very tired of sitting by his assistant in the lab, and having nothing particular to do other than radiobiological experiments. Once or twice he had peeped into his journals, or those of others, but nothing much took his interest or shook his world. He kept a small, ancient wireless on one of the window sills of the third floor. He loved the juxtaposition of such a crackly old piece of equipment having a place amidst the hum of all the latest technology. The weather report sputtered to life in the fading afternoon light as Frank turned the volume up.

  “Typhoon,” he heard. “Massive” with wind, rain and tsunami warnings. This would explain the cool gusts which had started to blow and the metallic smell of imminent rain. Frank looked out the open window at all the foliage. It would be grateful for the downpour it was about to receive. The jungle behind the lab fell into an eerie silence - literally the calm before the storm - as all the animals burrowed their way into holes and crevices and knots and cracks, behavior not unlike Frank’s. Sirens from the military bases began to wail in the distance as if to herald some ominous calamity. This was actually truer than most would realize.

  Frank woke the next morning, badly hungover, after a harrowing night of tempest. The typhoon had fully passed leaving a whisper quiet and sunny dawn. Groaning, he slowly sat up to recollect the previous night’s antics before the tranquility was shattered by the rumble of vehicles approaching the compound. He squinted through the slats of the blind as a beam of light shot through. He adjusted his eyes to see four large army je
eps and a tank pull up in front of the lab. Even from the third floor he could hear the thumping on the door.

  “Who the fuck is in charge and do any of you Japs speak English here?”

  At that moment, Honda ran through the lab door and looked at Frank alarmingly. “I do not speak English,” he said with beads of sweat growing above his eyebrows. “I need you to take care of this.” Gathering his thoughts, Frank nodded and made a dismissive waving gesture at Honda, implying that he would handle it.

  The banging on the door got louder as he trotted down the concrete stairs. Frank opened the door to see Sergeant Benson, a large man with a beer gut and a piggish face staring at him. His nose was as red as a strawberry and his eyebrows were intense, as if he were about to eat the meanest ass of all time.

  “Do you own this facility?” he bellowed.

  “No sir. This facility is run by my supervisor, Mr. Masayuki Honda.” Frank looked over at Honda who gave him a firm nod. “We’re a private research facility.”

  “In the mountains of Okinawa?” Benson asked, smiling as if he had found something good.

  “Yes.”

  “Documents, now!”

  “May I ask why you are visiting?”

  “I said documents, Jewnose Jap, are you fucking deaf?”