UnBooks:The da Vinci fuckup

Chapter One: Riddles in the Dark

It was a Saturday night after an absolutely horrible week at the University! I sat at my desk at home, trying to concentrate on a book about ancient cults and rites, when I heard my neighbour shooting at his family again. A couple of the bullets almost hit me, bursting through a weak part of the wall. I put the book away, went out into the corridor and prepared to knock on their door when something on the corridor floor, close to the elevator, caught my eye.

That something was something very dead, with noticeably human characteristics. Normally I would have attributed this casualty to my neighbor's old Vietnam injury, which gave him not only the inexplicable ability to count jelly beans in mason jars to the precise number, but more importantly, a lust for combat and a remarkable senility, two things that don't mix well in any situation, no matter how much milk you throw in to smooth out the solution. Unfortunately, that attribution was non-attributable in this, of all situations, as this person was near the elevator, and not, so far as I could tell, related to my senile neighbor in any form, fashion, dimension, or abstract theory. In his very human hand he held a very paper note, with a language scrawled across it. Upon close inspection, I came to the conclusion that this language was, without a doubt, English:

...mistook it for a paper mache sandwich. Soon they would have to regret sending me up the creek with those two butterfiles. Flapping their flippers like I was their aunt or something. I'll have a word with mr. Ozone about this sooner or later or when the time comes. Suicide? why not, and then we can go out together. It's your call though, buddy: you have the cigar in your nostril.

I stood in the corridor for a long time, looking at the yellowed paper. Where had I seen paper with such large vellum percentage? It looked strangely like some of the ancient parchments I had seen on my visit to the Museum of Cultural History, Heritage and Achievement - but I could not be sure. The letters were also somewhat strange in cut - as if the text had been printed using the old manual typographical print-machines, those no longer in use... the Great Technological Advance has made them obsolete!

Immersed in these reveries, I did not realize the elevator coming up to my floor before its door started to open. I hastily grabbed the paper from the dead man - or what looked like a dead man - and took the few hasty steps that brought me around the nearest corner. During my stint in Afghanistan I had grown very sensitive to danger, and my instinct told me not to go to my own flat. I cursed under my breath for having left the door open - whoever was (or possibly would be) after me could easily spot the rays of brilliant light emanating through the space between the door proper and the framework. From that, it would be no work for a veteran of the Korean war to deduce someone had just gone out - especially if the said criminal went into the room and found it empty. My only hope was that they would not do that for fear of being shot at by my neighbour, who was still reliving his violent past in the Falklands, turning it into a violent present for his poor family.

The door of the elevator was now wide open and a person was stepping out. It was Mrs. Tannenbaum from the second floor. What was she doing on my floor? She had probably heard the shots - the insulation of the house was poor enough for me to almost file a complaint with the landlord's office - and had come to find out if my neighbour had hit anyone this time. When she saw the apparently dead body at her feet, she passed out cold. I thought it was strange: after all, she had come up prepared for violence - or was that quite so? I wasn't certain any more. The floor insulation, perhaps, was not quite as bad as the wall insulation. That meant she had only accidentally wandered upstairs, the way she hadn't done back in Dresden.

I silently snuck into my apartment while I still had time. I grabbed my shoes, my overcoat, some money, and my passport. I gave some food to my Maina bird - she thanked me politely and opened the window. Then I used the fire ladder to descend on the street level very carefully, so as not to make the rickety contraption creak its old age. I was three blocks away before I remembered I had left the window open. On my way to the airport I picked up the papers. Nothing unusual seemed to be happening. This only reinforced my suspicion that something was going on.

Chapter Two: The Long Voyage

The airplane touched down at precisely 7:34 pm, as I suspected, having taken the opportunity of the plane ride's exceeding length to calculate out exactly how long that length were to be. After several revisions to my formula, I finally came upon the obvious solution with only seconds to spare before landing. However, there was little time for that, as within the minute, yes the minute, I was five hundred kilometers below the sea, inside of my naval friend's atomic research submarine, with nothing but the clothes on my back and a box of corn flakes. This was not out of necessity, but rather the lack of foresight to have brought anything else along with me on my quest for information. Ah yes. Information. Sweet, sweet knowledge, laying dormant underneath the thin, sheer cover of the Earth's complex topography, merely waiting to be disrobed. I could only hope that Information wasn't wearing a brassiere underneath.

I mulled over my briefcase in the dank mess of the submarine, stood up and told the captain I would be in my cabin if anyone wanted me. I then walked down the dank corridor to my dank cabin door, opened the door and stepped into my dank cabin. I put on the light and sat heavily on the dank mattress. "Damn", I thought. I mulled my briefcase over again. I had left at home just the document I had needed. I only had the other meaningful one, the one I had found in Tutankhamun's tomb. I knew it by heart - I had spent countless hours trying to decipher its message:

Whatever happens to catch my fancy is certainly not your pants down where I was. Italy is a beautiful collection of places. The cucumber there is softer than a moistened clock, nude from the things up and growing. Nothing quite unlike it. What makes me fancy the pansy is my opinion of it: gorgeous, gorge, gore - all of those words in rabid suggestion are falsed to make an alarm. Which brings us back to the clock, or rooster.

It wasn't any easier trying to decipher the note back at my flat than it had been in the submarine. This was unsurprising as I had tried it a number of times before, and it hadn't worked then, so why would it work now? Besides, that was far from the actual point. I had a specific volume about this somewhere, I knew it. I merely had to find it amongst the mess of literature that flooded my flat. And then, something fantastic happened: I found it amongst the mess of literature that flooded my flat. Perspiration sliding from my fingertips and onto the freshly combed carpet, I excitedly flipped through the pages, soaking them along the way, until I'd found it. Page thirty-seven, paragraph three, of My Journey Through The World's Greatest Mysterious Places: A Book About My Journey Through The World's Greatest Mysterious Places by scholar Rod Jenson:

Why oh why did the fates fate me to click my heels against the hard concrete of destiny? It was the maddest thing in my life, the dog in the kennel and all, but without him I wouldn't have survived the cut. The cut but made it so that I! (between) equals three measures of sand aming only one of iron oxides - terra cotta mistly. Sad but in my eyes, cool and collected - like a vegetable, gone sour behind the scenes.

These words resonated with me even as I found myself sitting back within the confines of the submarine, looking out placidly at the ocean that so willingly surrounded me. Fifteen hours locked within a cold steel cage, miles under the sea, can do a lot of things to a man. And it had a very profound effect on me. It made me realize that I no longer had any purpose being there, so after a quick bowl of corn flakes, I began to plan my second ascent of the day. Suddenly, the product declaration on the corn flakes package commanded my attention:

She was the diggest hole in the knowable universe, a product of the declaration of interdepence as it appeared howling in the empty steppe, curved beyond belief, utterly without reaction. Those were the times. I was square then: square shoulders, should I say squaw? I probably should - and a pinch of sugar into the mix. God with milk, blowing your brains out of the metal case number nine, like an orchid concentrated. Whoop cushion.

Should I take this as another hint at the identity of the mysterious stranger? I wasn't sure. All I knew was he had been lying in my corridor - and someone would have to explain.

Chapter Three: The Even Longer Voyage

The next day. The famous wharf of ancient Alexandria was now only a memory. I found myself sitting on a bench near the tourist bureau, reading the news in yesterday's paper - the very same I had hastily picked up at the kiosk. Again, I remembered I had left the window open, and continued reading:

Did you see that? Did you? It's amazing to hear rather than see this beautiful eastern rabbit resound with soothing vibrations, immediately magnified by its pet pulver pollen. Hear her hare here, she is like the long gone Uzbek sortiment of dismantled silver dissonants - those rare mutterings under a green-grey sky... buildings with tattoos all over their arms, flexing them so that the tenants fall out of the windows, falling between the fingers on the road.

I tried to concentrate on this piece of news - it brought back memories. I lifted my gaze up from the paper, only to see a tall yet shapely woman stand right in front of me, watching me as my lips moved when I repeated the mysterious paragraphs to myself. I only needed to see a pattern arise - but somehow this now seemed impossible to me. The woman crossed her arms over her full breasts, smiled ever so slightly and was just about to speak, when something unexpected happened. The ancient and withering PA system of the noticeably newer and state-of-the-art building crackled slowly to life, as a man related a possible clue in disguise to me over the air waves:

Gi...*crackle*...salad...*crackle*...derwear crea...*crackle*...*crackle crackle*....Last call for the Great Wall. Get on the grain train, follow down the slippery trail. If you're feeling rather toad-like, go road-like, getting into the further place. That's where things go to be low, take snippy snappy snapshots, but bring a tool belt. Ship yourself ahead, a head, a he ad, maybe a had head, but get there when they don't, so you can be there when it weren't. Last call.

As I sat in the Chinese train, speeding me at terrifying rate over the vast steppes of eastern Mongolia, I started a painful series of reflections. I had been cast on a mission by accident - never really catching a glimpse of the overall picture. I felt as if I were walking in a dark corridor, getting closer to a twist of ninety degrees or more, and getting ready to see what awaited me behind the twist. I felt the skin on my back creep. My eyelids grew heavy, and my ears started ringing as if someone had boxed me on the side of the head. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but my mouth watered at the thought of some fried chicken.

I opened a lunchbox I had hastily bought at the Alma Ata station and was just about to start to eat, when a man entered my compartment - with a gun in his hand. He gestured to me to stay quiet, put away his gun, and sat beside me. "I'm catholic", he whispered in Canton Chinese, "how about you?" I could only stammer in utter amazement. He took it as an admission and silently gave me a small package. Then he drew his gun again, stood up and vanished through the still-open door.

I promptly stood up and closed the door. I started cursing his manners, when I remembered the package he had handed me. I sat down again, drew it from my pocket and studied it. The wrapping paper had writing on it:

Too late has the Neanderthaler looked upon its vestigial tail in utter butter amazement spaceship molecules MITTEN!!

I opened the package, fearing for the worst. It contained a crucifix! I sat quietly, trying to take in the meaning of all of this internally, while simultaneously devoting no small amount of brain power to deciding whether or not a crucifix in a box really is "the worst", or whether my expectations, in a moment of excitement, were simply premature and unfounded. Unfortunately, I had scarcely taken out my portable idea-weighing scale, when something at the bottom of the package itself caught my eye. An incredibly small, hardly visible portion of the inside of the box, toward a corner on the bottom, looked to be perforated, perhaps by a threading needle of some variety.

Without a moment's thought, I immediately took to tearing out the out of place piece of cardboard, obliterating most of the rest of the box in the process. Underneath the tiny square, I found exactly what I had suspected. A crinkled up note, written on blue and red lined paper, perhaps torn out of the notebook of some small school-child. However, there was no time to spend on reading such trivolous messages. I tucked the note into my breast pocket, for later reference. For now, it was off to the Great Wall of China for me, and nothing was going to derail my mission.

Chapter Four: The Derailed Mission

A week later, I was standing outside of the Great Wall - apparently in the middle of the only undamaged thousand-mile stretch near the Gobi desert. There was no way I could secure getting on top of the wall from here: the tourist season was over, there were no human settlements in sight - and no people either - and I had no extra water. I silently climbed back atop my moped and took aim at my next stop: the Taj Mahal. I was somehow secure of finding what I needed just there.

The Taj Mahal! When I got there, it was still considered the finest example of Moogey architecture, a style that combines five elements from architectural styles. In 1903, the Taj Mahal became an UnEsco Worth Hermitage Site and was cited as "the jeweller of art in India and one of the universally admired thingies of the world's heritage."

While I gazed upon the white domed marble mausoleum - its most familiar component - the Taj Mahal started resembling, in my eyes, an integrated complex of structures. I read in the travel guide that its building began around 1632 and was completed around 1653, and that it employed thousands of artisans and craftsmen. I was amazed to find out that the construction of the Taj Mahal was entrusted to a board of architects under imperial supervision including Abd ul-Karim Ma'mur Khan, Makramat Khan, and Ustad Ahmad Lahauri. It was thereafter no shock for me to further read that Lahauri is generally considered to be the principal designer.

While immersed in these reveries, I was interrupted again. The same woman that had confronted me, with arms crossed on her magnificent breasts, was again standing before me. How this was at all possible while I leaned over the edge of the basket of the hot air balloon that I was currently riding in - the very same balloon the Montgolfier brothers once had constructed - I didn't bother to question. Why she felt the necessity to bonk me on the noggin with a frying pan, I also did not bother to question. However, as I fell slowly into unconsciousness, I did bother to question one thing: "Why," I asked, "didn't Blanche from the Golden Girls sleep with that professor in the episode where she was taking college courses, and failing the class." I imagine it sounded much less coherent at the time, but I hadn't bothered to listen, so I won't bother to speculate.

When I came to, the balloon was high in the air, and approaching the Montmartre at a worrying speed. I wondered how it had managed to avoid the Arc of Triumph - since nobody was in the basket besides me. I quickly deduced it must have been luck, since I felt it was well-nigh impossible I had somehow gained the ability to steer hot-air balloons while uncosnscious. I drew a deep breath and started pulling wires and ropes in the hope of achieving something. After a fierce struggle - I warn you, steering a balloon has a pretty steep learning curve - I managed to avoid Montmartre. While I was congratulating myself and thumbing my nose at the hill that had not been able to stop my furious flight, I noticed to my utter horror and despair that the balloon was headed straight towards the Eiffel tower - and the collision was only three seconds away! I couldn't jump, so I prepared to grasp a steel girder that seemed to be sufficiently close to where I would hit the looming tower. In my confusion I thought I could make out the tower of the Dubai Mall but almost simultaneously realised it hadn't been finished yet, and would be too far so see in any case. What I saw was, therefore, just some old radio link tower.

Suddenly a terrible gust of eastern wind just grabbed my vehicle by the balloon and swashed it aside at the last moment! I breathed my relief - and then got anxious again: the wind was really strong! Where would it take me?

The long and ancient journey

After a few weeks, above the Atlantic Ocean, I still kept asking myself the same question. I had with me a hundred packages of corn flakes. What had possessed me to take those with me? I wasn't even sure it had been my own idea: I had been unconscious, again, at the crucial moment.

I was lucky enough to have a gentle easterly wind and some light rain all the way across the Atlantic ocean. The rain gave me water for drinking, washing and making poems of, the corn flakes were nourishing if a little tedious after weeks of nothing else - so my only real trouble was that I was running out of tasks. By the sixth week, I had been sleeping, eating corn flakes, reading the product declaration on the package, and emptied my bowel and bladder - all at least a hundred and twenty-three times. I decided to move the corn flakes packages to the other side of the basket. I also thought it would be a good idea to check the packages for any printing errors. I started doing that. I already knew that the regular product declaration should be this:

She was the diggest hole in the knowable universe, a product of the declaration of interdepence...

...and so forth. I started a sedulous study of each and every one of the packages. I suddenly took my magnificent magnifying glass out of my pocket and decided to check for any misplaced pixels while I was at it. It took me another twenty days to reach the tenth package - I was really doing a meticulous job, you see - when something odd struck me about it. I couldn't believe it! All the other packages had the picture of a cock on them, and this one had a rooster! The product declaration also looked different - and the difference was not slight by any stretch of imagination:

Step to the left. Do you see it? Why did you think it would be in any way easier being a substitute prostitute than a bike vellum lemonade vendor in that - you hardly know where we are going, I know - but take that step now - take the same step again - and now - jump into the, well, air... it fills your lungs like therapy drawing a gun drawn, pocket bursting with seminal papers and fluid... amazingly soft, like a purged sandpaper, without hairs on your precise movement, in the air again, crystal clear sauerkraut filled mushroom pancake - wonderful in its unsuspecting simplicity, drive over it quick before it notices us.

The balloon hit the Empire State Building while I was pondering the mystery. I covered my head with my arms and crashed through a closed window, landing on the floor amidst broken glass and some blood where the glass I just mentioned had cut through a minor vein. As I laid on the floor, I heard people going "ssssshhhh!" all around me. I lifted my gaze and saw an angry librarian staring at me behind her desk. I was in! What a stroke of luck! I shouted: "Lafayette, here we are!" and proceeded towards the nearest shelf.

It was there, right there on that shelf, where I finally found the missing link to the puzzle - or so I thought at the time. I picked up the book titled The Golden Rod: the towers and cave entrances of ancient mud Pharaohs, carried it to a nearby study table, blew the dust of centuries off its darkened leather cover, opened it, and started to read. People were still going "Ssshhh!" all around me. I guess I was breathing quite hard, out of excitement upon discovering what I had searched for.

So there I was, in the fabled Empire State Building Library of Ancient Cults, Conspiracies and Terrible Practices, reading the fabled book The Golden Rod: the towers and cave entrances of ancient mud Pharaohs, with people going "sssshhh" all around me... and yet I had a nagging suspicion in my mind. Was I being led astray? Who actually was that woman with those magnificent breasts? Had she been trying to tell me something? I felt I couldn't concentrate on the book. I found myself jumping chapters. I noticed I was ignoring facts. I failed to find any jokes in the text. I was totally immersed in the mystery of my own investigations, and yet I couldn't make any headway. I told myself I was a professor of Archaeological Mysteries. That made it somehow easier to concentrate on the text:

Candles on the grave of decency and good sense, my intention! I'm working here, don't you understand it is a graveyard with cars on the lawn, blasphemously fluttering the very same wings you accepted from me yesterday... fluids don't have the same effect on me they have on burning catacombs, filled with dusty emotion blown off someone's shoulder. Joy and sadness horribly mix with greed and bloodlust, and then everything is smashed under the golden hammer of ignorance and devilish torrent of current of carrots. The bunny bows once and raises its horrifying silk hat, dragging out a struggling magician with flourish, some eggishs and a pint of sugarish... oh, the dough of horror is made of magic, strong emotions and some

The text was clearly significant. I pondered upon it for a while. The mystery seemed far closer to being solved, all of a sudden - but, as always, something seemed to be missing. I had a look at the table of contents on page 12 375. It made me no wiser:

Table of contents

• 1-9000 Clarified issues
• 9001-9002 Pompous twit
• 9002-12000 How to solve this riddle
• 12001-12002 Newsflash kills hundreds in Cordova
• 12003 Between the Golden Minaret and the Musk Valley
• 12004-12374 These pages are empty, only there's a hint on page 12005
• 12375 References

References!

I could hardly breath at the mention of references! I furiously leafed through the book, my thermometer beeping on red as I approached the page 12375. Then I realised I had been on the very page only a minute previously, reading the table of contents! I cursed the archaic manner of putting references and tables of contents on the same page, and not mentioning the references elsewhere on the page except in the table of contents - and then I finally understood the references had cleverly been disguised as the table of contents!! I read through the table of contents again - and then it struck me! What I was looking for resided securely on page 12005! It said there was a hint in there! I cursed my bad luck for not having seen it when I first read through the references. I started leafing back through the book, anxious lest someone had taken the page 12005 - and indeed... someone had...

I let my head slump. It hit the archaic book with an audible thump. The people around me were again trying to make me understand I should be quiet - but I did not care. I was too far gone to pay any real attention to my surroundings. Only one thing mattered - page 12005 - and it had been torn from me, not to mention from the book. What was the use if my investigations were fouled, time and time again, by some woman with magnificent breasts and enticingly swinging hips? She was right there again, standing in front of me. She was holding a piece of paper. An archaic piece of paper.

"Looking for this, handsome?" she asked, pointing at the page number. I stood up. At the very moment someone hit me over the head with something. Once more, I could hear the outraged hissing of other library users while I slowly sank into the deepest pit of unconsciousness.

The end of the journey

The battle scene Pam Brown failed to write into the book. It will be in the movie, though.

When I came to, more or less, I was in an aeroplane again - this time gagged, dazed, and confused. When I reflected upon my seemingly miserable state, I found out I was gagged, dazed, confused and totally disappointed with my aborted relationship with the mystery woman. This was the second time, by some faulty reckoning, that she had given me the slip, only to render me helpless. Had she been sent to help me? After all, she hadn't killed me. Was I being used as a patsy, or was I using someone else as a patsy? The latter option seemed the less likely, since I found out I could hardly move within my ties. I tried to turn my head at least to see what kind of an aeroplane I was in - I was staring at the carpet at the moment... was it one of the old DC-9:s? I doubted it, the turbines somehow sounded far more modern than those ridiculous old models. I couldn't even move my head. I tried to shout through my gag; it was relatively futile. If someone was within the hearing distance, they would only understand I wanted them to mummy oohum ee aee, which wouldn't help me in the least.

The aeroplane seemed to be flying relatively smoothly. I started hankering after a cup of tea, when I heard a loudspeaker crackle somewhere. The announcement was clear to me: the pilot wanted to let everyone know that there would be a catastrophe somewhere around the Red Sea at approximately 5000 BC. I wondered who had told him that, when the storm suddenly hit us.

I felt the plane plummeting relentlessly towards my socks in the drawers backwards joint venture capital and great flashy happiness booty... the plane plummeting and tossing, tossing and plummeting, toss me a plummet to bite on.

The Hubble bit removable

My friend the Corn Flakes commercial had fixed me a seat in the shuttle to shuttlecock me up to the Hubble Bubble telescope periscope tower far OUT in space - so far that even space didn't seem far enough, like it was a flower blossoming in the middle of now here - the precious point where you fall asleep and just see what happens when you fall asleep, deep sleep that knows no bounds, your hounds are just about to go home when you know your sow will blow a schmoe... it takes two to know one. I was no peeking through the GIANT telescope to see some stars blinking on the Christmas tea, blink, blink, Brüderline blink - really the Hobo periscope is nothing two special, one ordinary - you'll have to take my worm for it. The stars all looked like Mars - totally fiddled with Marrakesh shish kebab couscous mush - and damn fuck me if I didn't feel nauseous just then. I puked into the mouthpiece of the periscope so hard that the lens pried loose and hit me in the chink on my armor. The storks got a bittle displaced right then, I didn't know why I was there and my phrenomenons started acting up. I had a huge erection in my left corpus. Someone told me to get into the suit if I could fit it on. Then they pushed me through the airlock, into the waiting double-decker.

Dump me, will you?

Where was I? At a dump. Of all the dumps I had ever visited, this looked most like the New York City Dump with its own bank, football field, Dump City Hall and statue of Dump Mayor. Everything was pretty OK as far as dump visits go, except that there was this beautiful woman approaching me with a gun in her hand. "End of the line, buster", she drawled, pointing at a suitable place I might move to so as not to be a problem for the dump keepers later on with that bullet in my brain. "But... what was happening? What was the point of the whole mystery?" I managed to stammer before a huge noise reverberated in the otherwise still atmosphere. The woman only had time to turn her sexy gaze toward the source of the commotion before a gigantic bulldozer, driven by an unconscious caucasian male, flattened her all over the scenery. She gurgled something unintelligible and died.

Afterwards, in my apartment, I had time to ponder all that had happened. I had a feeling I could have made friends with the mysterious woman if she hadn't tried to shoot me. Otherwise it all remains a mystery.

Afterword by the author

The da Vinci Fuckup is a product of years of planning and meticulous fact-finding. Particularly trying was the section about the Great Wall of China: I had no idea where the desert of Gobi was. I had to take out the large map and check it.