‘The Torture Show’

Here’s a submission under the rubrique “existentialist”, “surrealist” or “Dada”, and inspired by our philosopher friend Michel Foucault…and the media during the turbulent Naughties.

It’s Chapter #11 of “The Great Scroll of Banciao.” So far it’s only been covered in a Venetian literary mag and on Taiwan radio, never serialized or anything. Perhaps if the reviews are good we will submit another chapter next time ’round.

There are literally “fantastic” etchings by illustrator Mark Perrault on the way to accompany this piece.
Respectfully yours,
Copyright Trista di Genova,  Oxford University

Word count: 2,515

The Torture Show

“Reality is so bad you have to fictionalize it.”

“You can tell a lot about a society by its junk food.”

In this society, people were “randomly chosen by ballot,” as it was called, to be scapegoats. They were snatched and summarily unplugged from their home cells. They were elaborately costumed as Models, then put on military tribunal and televised on TS1 (Telemundo Screen One). Here, the drama object was almost without fail tortured and at length executed. Much to the delight of the Audience, the torture was bizarre, horrific, and exhaustive, and every week came in eight-hour installments, simulcast in mandatory town halls throughout the world.

Tickets sold out at once, so there was even no need for scalpers.
One of the best things about the Torture Show was there were no commercials, at least consciously. Commercials were subliminably telemarinaded, or stewed into the minds of the Audience, a bit like the tea eggs of old.

The televised torture would begin through a dazzling display, a mediablitz of the senses so discombobulating that the combined effect on the Prisoner Model was paralysing. It was described “as if a Sumo wrestler had thrown a kitten against the wall.”

One week’s topic for global discussion was The Effects of Hard Rock at High Decibels on Prisoner Models. Last week the show theme was No-Holds-Barred, Barbaric and Hammeringly Repetitive Military-Style Executions of Terrorist Models, All Thoroughly Justified.

One of the most memorable acts involved a Boot Camp Model; they chose him because in this case Militainment Personnel didn’t want to discriminate against civilians.

This Show starts with a recreation of a Filipino brothel exclusively set up to service Militainment Personnel. During the initial orgy, every five minutes a commode is filled with stool and urine samples of randomly selected members of the Drunken Militainment Audience (by lottery), and this vile stuff was actually funneled into his mouth. Yeah, I know, that sounds really foul. The collective shiver that went down everyone’s spine produced some fine material.

Then they deprived the Boot Camp Model of unconsciousness, food, and water for a week, while playing a Guns and Roses song continuously, just to bring in a sense of continuity in from last week’s Show.

The soldier was a strong one, but everyone has their breaking point, which was presumably the point of that experiment: to find breaking points by destroying people. This week, when they finally managed to prise him free from his legs, his eyes were bleeding and everything, his face flaxen once they managed to hose him down in that dungeon thing they often used to illustrate the decomposition process.

For this Week’s episode, like every week of the new Torture Show Celebration Festival Series, Bill and Zed, and the Jim Morrison Clone JimmyBuffet.exe, received a Torture Show invitation buzzed to them on their skin bracelets.

Every week the three “cellies,” along with any other Members of the Audience, would be rallied and transported to the performance. They checked in at the Box Office, and each of the Viewers’ boxes was “escorted” (kicked through) to their seat through a long Viewer Turnstile Warehouse. The Telemundo Screen was previewing images of preliminary sketches and reminiscences of all the many ways people can die. Palestine was an Audience favourite.

Gratis the Snack Shop, Brother Jim, Bill and Zed were all issued what was marketed and labeled as “Sweet Victory Popcorn” and “Sweet Victory Chocolate.” They were both actually promotional freebies, in exchange for which would cost them some lifeblood.

What they called “popcorn” was essentially salt-covered orange plastic balls, made in Taiwan. You had to eat the plastic wrap first, then suck off the so-called “sugar” (“sugar” was actually plastic-based “salt”; there was in fact no real sugar anymore) off the coated ball (of plastic), which had been recycled thousands of times.

The plastic dissolved in one’s mouth, not in one’s hands, and contained narco-sedatives and endorphine-like stimulants, as well as a mild aphrodisiac, and an opiate derivative made from the poppy fields of what was now Kabul. In fact, that’s what the yellow plastic packaging said for the chocolate: Made in Kabul.

Kabul was also where the central movie studio was stationed, at least officially, for security reasons. In actuality, Kabul Studios was geographically stationed in what had once been sprawling, beautifully forested and heavily guarded Beverly Hills. The studio base was at the victory mansion of a sectarian nudist colony, held captive as a film crew.
Kabul Studios consisted of only the most brilliantly sycophantic individuals. They were the only ones allowed an education, technical or otherwise, so their position was much coveted throughout the remaining world.

They were the crême de la crap students of pop culture, bred for their recognisability and photogeneticity. Then they were trained and certified in a 2-year vocational programme called “Execution Studies”.

Although they were trained in everything including medicine and stage design, they mostly hung out floating in pool cells, coked out intravenously, with a strong empathy suppressant coursing through their veins which they prescribed for themselves.

Most members of the audience at this week’s Torture Show were similarly pre-mobilized; that is, in an induced comatic state, whether naturally or enhanced by State Medicine in the form of a plastic, salted and doped cheeseball, wrapped in plastic.

In case viewers had to be stretchered in, they would be assigned “seating” (installed in electrocution-style chairs) in the Intensive Trauma Therapy Division of the Town Hall Auditorium. There they were conscientiously attended by paramilitary genetic medics who would one way or another “reanimate” the individual.

At first, Members of the Audience would be “encouraged” (ordered) to put on seatbelts for their own safety, and told to put their hands on the armrests. Then, vinyl shackles would enclose their wrists in a vise-like grip. Helmets came out of all of the headrests, all at once.

“Are you shufu / bu shufu?” urged the Telemundo prompter, in Chinese hip-hop style.

“Shufu,” the world yelled; or at least it was said to have yelled.

Whatever you voted, without fail the outcome would be recorded as “Oh, hell yeah. Very comfortable.” However, when you vote, you are only tacitly agreeing that you are comfortable that it is not comfortable.
Should an Audience Member attempt to avoid the helmet as it descends, an usher would soon be checking all the aisles, note they are improperly installé in the chair, and they would voluntarily be whipped to death; or they would have their arms and legs chopped off and bleed to death, as they first tried to hobble, and then roll, away.

Once they made one of these “defectors,” or “apathetic voters” into an illustration of how to make beef jerky strips, with complimentary samples distributed to all Members of the remaining Florida Audience. Few Member Models therefore ventured to shirk off their civic duty of installing themselves in the Torture Show.

The crowd would first shift uncomfortably in their scrap-plastic seat as they found the most comfortable position they could in the contraption. Then they quietened as the Telescreen 1 began issuing instructions in Chinese:

“We warmly huang guanling you aboard the Torture Show. Right, let’s get started. The next person who moves in their chair will be summarily executed.”

To their credit no one moved, anywhere in the entire world, for two seconds. It registered so everywhere on the digital Mundoclock. This was amazing to contemplate, because usually someone somewhere moved within a split second. The objective, I suppose, was to cultivate a sense of futility in the face of pending disaster, and to cull out anyone who was not fully, truly apathetic. Or perhaps few conscious people were actually left in the world.

Then, a big neon sign lit up saying:

ON THE AIR

and a cheerful signature tune was played. The lights went up on a stage in the center of the room. It was decorated much like the talk shows of olden days; with two dynamic, tight-jumpered and smart-looking white News Reporter Models semi-facing each other, with a coffee table in between them. They were sipping what they claimed was a frothing latté.

An offscreen announcer jives over the intercom:

“LIVE ON THE SCENE: DEATH!”

“Huang Guanling to the Torture Show, created by US, and watched by every last one of you. So let’s get this party started,” grooves the Blonde Reporter Model in a sultry voice.

“I’m so with you,” oozes the Tanned and Handsome Reporter Clone. “Today our first Executee” – here they smile knowingly at the Audience through the camera before them – “is Imam Malikai, 50 years of age, who comes from Lahore. Funny name, that. Sounds like a French bimbo. Or shall I say bimba. No doubt that’s why he’s still alive. The name of his town is so cool!”

They both titter conspiratorially, finding their cosmopolitan wit endearing and indescribably precious to each other. They flutter their eyelashes, flirting with their reflections on the monitors before them.

LAUGH

orders the screen before the Audience, in Modern modified Chinese. The Audience at once bellows with laughter.

“Are you a WHORE, Imam, or is that just where you come from?”

LAUGH

The Audience tried to double up with laughter, and they couldn’t quite slap their knees.
“Maybe for fun we’ll pit you against some kind of Enemy Model from Maputa. My bitch, my whore, get it? Ahhh, that makes me piss in my pants busting up. A whore, just like you, Tony.”

At this point, the Reporter Models boffed each other lustfully, the Male Reporter’s member was whipped out of his zipper and they did it while the Audience reputedly went into hysterics. This was classic, slapstick entertainment, the Audience was/were said to have thought. But they were just an entire generation of circus elephants forever shackled by invisible chains.

LAUGH HARD

orders the Screen.
Meanwhile, a Makeup Assistant is fretting offstage, wondering whether she put too much powder on the Woman Reporter Model’s face. She has been notified which Member of the Reporting Team will be later consumed for the surprise charity buffet execution. She is worried because the makeup might inhibit the Reporter Modelperson, her client, from sweating properly when the situation called for the reporter’s professionally staged public demise.

A Token Black Reporter appears onscreen, very handsome and well-built, with a wide and manly jaw. He is wearing a Havana loungesuit, and an ethnic reggae scarf, which will instantly make him the fashion envy of all the men who are left, after the press release is issued. It shows off his chocolate-hued complexion to its fullest advantage. He speaks into a microphone in a nice, deep, resonant voice, saying:

“Thanks, Links. Okay, congratulations everybody. Here is Imam of Lahore, who was the first to move in his seat today. My, my, my, what a fine Tourist-bot you’d make! Today, I, another black albeit Christian man, will chop off this black Muslim man’s head while he prays to Allah. This proves conclusively, for the first time in known history, that there is no such thing as racist. What a triumphant moment this must be!” thundered the intercom.

The helmet and wrist-straps simultaneously roll off a man in his seat, to reveal the face of a drawn and shocked-looking Lahore resident, a Mr. Imam B. Malikai. He is frozen to his chair, his white lips bared against his teeth in a grimace of terror, his face a sickly yellow. It looked pretty realistic.

“Get on the prayer mat, sand monkey,” snarls the Token Black Reporter. At that point he grabbed the primary Telemundocamera and stuck it to his forehead, so that everyone in the audience could see for themselves: what is it really like to be a black man executing another black man? What was it like for a Christian to kill an Arab, or an Arab killing another Arab? Perhaps that would solve the problem of racism, once and for all?
The man pulled back into his chair, and tried to hold on to the armrest until his fingers were of course ripped from it. Then he was put into a giant slingshot, with the help of a big plastic prodding stick and a 3-meter-wide rubber band. A brief but informative math segment of the show calculated how far the rubber band would have to be pulled back so that he would be accurately catapulted onto a big prayer mat a hundred li away. They also estimated the probable trajectory time, and the velocity upon impact. It was kind of grisly, but the slo-mo film fotage showed how upon impact he became a tangled heap, after parts of him had flown practically everywhere. Then he skidded for quite a long ways, with more bits coming off, before coming to a mess of a standstill.

“Try to get your Allah to save you now,” guffawed the Black Man. “Where’s your Allah now? Come on, say it, al-ham-d-alah. Allah akbar,” he sneered at today’s first Prisoner Model. “C’mon, hurry up, darkie. We don’t have all day.”

A steamroller came out and smashed both of them, both Imam and the Black Killer Reporter Model.

The Audience seemed to have cheered, but that had to be recorded over the unexpected gasp they gave. The surprising bit about it for the Audience was that a Reporter model had been snuffed. Usually Reporters were killed sparingly, because it took a while to train them. Since they were expensive to kill, they weren’t considered cost-effective, so they were usually spared, at least ostensibly.

This time, HR had to make an announcement to explain what might have otherwise been considered gratuitous violence. HR explained that “No, no, me-o,” it wasn’t gratuitous violence. They left a telememo saying that “any references to the fact that other languages even existed, was, for the moment, banned, and strictly forbidden.”
This, of course, like other warnings, meant certain execution for an Offender. Since they could at whim render someone an Offender, anyone – and everyone – was now a target. It was part of a new “one strike whether real or imagined and no-holds-barred you’re out” policy.
The screen suddenly changed to a shot of the Host Models, who were seated cozily in their sofas, “pouring” what they claimed to be Hokkaido green milk tea. The Audience licked its/their lips. The milk container and sugar cubes were left untouched, which is a good thing, because they were all just plastic props. The Hosts weren’t actually drinking Hokkaido green milk tea; the Audience just had to imagine they did.

The couple flirtatiously assembled themselves for the camera, grinned engagingly, and purred, “Well, whaddya say, Audience? Shall we kill another random individual in a mortally offensive manner, for all to enjoy and marvel at, and then publish our own independent surveys? Heh! Or shall we for once spare a life? Ah, there, wouldn’t that be a nice change?” A new Reporter Model said, yawning prettily.

The crowd was ejected en masse into a standing position, and neurologically pinched so as to shout out aloud what the red neon sign prompted them (in Modern Modified Chinese):

“GO
DEATH
GO!”

[THE END ... of Chapter 11]

Trista di Genova, a former writer/editor for The China Post and Taipei Times, has observed goings-on in America for the past 8 years with horror, while living in blissful exile in Banciao City, Taiwan. She founded rentacrowd.com, blogs for The Wild East (thewildeast.net), is a painter, poet, musician, filmmaker and compulsive gardener, and degreed from UC Berkeley and Oxford University. “The Torture Show” is an excerpt from her 2004 work, “The Great Scroll of Banciao,” which, among other works, is available through lonewolfpress.com and City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.