Perhaps the oddest thing about living here, in Madra, uh, wait, that sounds weird. Living with Madra? That's like we're shacked up. And, in a sense, we are. I mean, we share all the day to day dirties. We have sex, of a sort. I guess you could say I have this incredibly intelligent sugar mama. Something like that. I guess if I fuck cars, I'm autoerotic. *cough*
What I was going to say is that the strangest thing is that there are different realities at work in this tiny space. And it's all because of Madra. I couldn't even begin to imagine what's going on in the rats' nest of the backseat. For one, it's all just one big jumble of crap. For another, I'd lose a finger just trying to take a peek. But recently I found something that let me in on the dynamic that exists between the rats and Madra, and how it is so very different from what I experience of her and yet somehow the same.
We had stopped for a much needed break. I sat for a few minutes with my eyes closed, feeling the car not move and yet still reeling with the forward motion. I really get into that sensation. It's horizontal vertigo. Horizingo? Also, without the AC, Madra's interior was heating up and the sun slowly baked me like a marinated tofu. It was a completely gratis psychedelic experience of turning as a burning flywheel. The red sun churned through my eyelids.
I heard movement in the backseat. the rats were climbing out. They were leaving the nest. I turned and watched my vision go from a silvery and washed out like an overexposed photograph. (Remember those? Photographs? Heh, weird shit.) Then it coalesced to an image like tv on a screen where all the pixels are confused. I was dumbfounded. The rats left the car even less than I did. We probably had about the same level of threat from exposure to the elements and things that wanted to eat us. But I was more prone to cabin fever, I suppose. One by one, they clambered to the window and dropped over. Even Claudius, with the fucked up paw, dropped onto the road. I heard Caesar wheezing through his tracheotomy already outside. There must have been something interesting to ratkind out there for them all to leave.
I took the opportunity to do a little spying. I pull back some cardboard and fishing around. Under the vinyl webbing I found the stash: tiny comic books for rat hands and rat eyes, 4 by 6 centimeters. I could barely read the text. I spread the covers. The name of the tiny books was RatRace 500. And here was issues 1-4. Madra performed the digital equivalent of clearing her throat.
"What are you doing Henry?" She whispered.
"I'm bored. Don't I get comix?"
"Be sure to put them back when you're through. Those are someone's prized stuff. You don't know how possessive they can be."
"Oh, I get an ideara. Don't you worry bout me. I'll put them right back." And damn me to Hell with a busload of Jehovah's Witnesses if they weren't some of the best comix I ever read.
The first issue started right off with some action, some race across the desert. It was brutal. The front runner runs out of gas and crawls out into the desert to die. There are crashes, dead rats exploding out of the windshields. Just like that old movie, Deathrace 2000. What I gather is that the story takes place in some post-apocalyptic Earth. Rats have taken over the planet and walk around on two legs, like humans. They lose their tails and just generally become more human-like. I thought this was a little silly, at first. I mean, we humans make animals anthropomorphic because we like the idea of animals in human form. It's entertaining to us to think that way. Wouldn't rats want other creatures to be more ratlike so they can relate to them? Anyhoots, I didn't get the point of this till later.
They don't say what happened to the humans. I just assumed that whatever caused the rats to mutate also killed all of us hairlesss ape types. You read enough science fiction and you get a whole slew of stuff to assume about the future. Maybe it was biological warfare that killed the humans but never jumped over to rats. The cool thing is that the author knows this and can use your assumptions against you, to surprise you. I wonder what the rats were thinking when they read this?
So the rats just stepped right into the culture of cars, racing and killing each other. The races were bloody affairs. Rats didn't seem to value each other's lives too much. Just like humans. You got to wonder where they learned all this. Again, I'm reading into it, but that's most of the fun.
These racing rats did a lot of speed and ate only chicken. They raise them in coops and haul the coops everywhere with them in old delivery trucks. They use the bones for cash, which is fine because they can also eat the bones if they're really hungry. Makes sense to make money out of food. They move around like gypsies racing their cars that are constantly repairing, scavenging parts from the rotting hulks of cars that lay around everywhere. They modified the engines to run on chicken fat.
The main character is this rat named Petey. He's the son of an old racer named Pops or some shit. He has this crazy uncle who nobody understands. That's because he's a rat scientist, only no one thinks of him that way because he's probably the only one. The uncle comes up with this theory that cars are a limited resource and one day, there will be no more cars. Everyone laughs at him. Of course, there will be more cars. They grow everywhere.
"What do you think about those comics, Henry?" Madra asked.
"They're pretty cool. I think I get it. This is all a warning to the rats not to be like humans, assuming that there will always be more of everything even though we used it all up."
"So you think I did a pretty good job with the art and everything?"
"What? You made these?"
"Sure did. I had some good models for them, mice and rats were prominent sources of caricature back in the 20th Century."
"Huh." That's when I realized that the backseat was a school. Madra was raising the next intelligent race of beings to dominate the planet, to replace the foolish humans that fucked it all up. I wondered why the hell they even needed me along. What use could I possibly be? With all my self-abuse and paranoid ranting, was I the negative role model?
"Madra? What did the chickens eat?"
"Henry, it's only a comic book."