The October Surprise, aka The Trojan Teddy Bear
A true story of fiction about 2020 based on outright lies
As this dreadfully eventful year of 2020 enters its stretch run, there is little left for you crazy humans to do but wait. For what, no one can say, but everyone is sharing their opinions, pontificating until blue in the face, polluting the atmosphere with “facts” that are more like bad gas.
On one thing, though, you can all agree: These are the End Times.
Just what is the nature of these End Times? What is causing them? How will they be resolved? Well, such questions are where the confusion, and verbal fisticuffs, begin.
And nowhere on your vast, beautiful, bountiful planet, which some of my fellow aliens have dubbed the Ball of Confusion, is more emblematic of this craziness than the country called the United States of America.
Oh Americans, with your crazy creativity, how we love thee despite yourselves! Over the past decade, most of you have developed opinions about the Truth which are distinctly yours, yet just about all of you are so self-assured that your version is the correct version that you’ll proudly tell us all about it (at least until we tell you to buzz off already).
Having said that, many of you have joined tribes which coagulate around certain narratives. The narratives that have the most emotional weight, that carry within them the deepest bites from the shadow side of the human apple, well, those are able to rise above the noise of the many other tribal narratives.
A few of these have even earned names. If you’ll allow me, let me cover one of the biggies from, as you all like to say, “both sides” (as though a Ball of Confusion has two sides!).
From “the Right,” you have the Q-Anoners. These are folks who follow a mysterious identity on-line known only as Q who apparently works close enough to the halls of power to know all of its secrets and reveals them in cryptic tweets. Yes, things have gotten so nuts in your world that “tweet” has become a common verb for a form of human communication.
These Q-Anoners’ basic narrative is that there is a group of Satanic pedophiles who power themselves on the blood of virgin babies — or something — and this group is led by none other than Hillary Clinton, that poor, rich woman who had lost the United States presidential election in 2016 by winning three million more votes than her opponent, Donald Trump (I’ll get to how that can be, in a second. Whenever you find yourself confused by this tale, just say to yourself, “Ball of Confusion, that’s what the world is today,” okay? Good.).
Once in power, the Q-Anon narrative goes, President Trump began to lead a secretive war to “drain the swamp” of said pedophiles and “make America great again.” Q-Anoners have been growing like mold on months-old bread that no one has the gumption to toss out, some are even likely to be elected to national office in the upcoming 2020 election. Many decent people have bought into this narrative, for it gives them a chance to be on Team Good Guy fighting against the ultimate evil: people who hurt children and gain power by doing so.
(Personally, I kinda admire their creativity. Nuts, to be sure, but the kind of nuts that turns me on like vintage Orange Sunshine LSD.)
Then, “from the Left”, some of y’all have coagulated into a group known as Russiagaters. Unlike the Q-Anoners, these folks adore the aforementioned Hillary. They’d put high hopes into her winning not the popular vote, which by an ingenious design by America’s “Founding Fathers” doesn’t matter, but the vote of the Electoral College, which does. (That’s as much of an explanation as you’ll get. “Ball of Confusion, Ball of…”) They were so high on those hopes that when they danced in anticipation of the results in ballrooms under elaborate glass ceilings on Election Night November 2016, the actual results not only ruined the party but put a real damper on the next four years. I heard one young Russiagater claim, “My mom said that night — and the realization of four years of Donald Trump as president — was akin to being dosed with a time-lapsed version of the dreaded brown acid of Woodstock in ‘69!”
And then, even though their psychedelic elders like Your Faithfully True Narrator gave them the advice of looking within for the answers as to just how their Anointed One, this woman with a resume dressed for success, could lose to such a blowharded bozo as Donald Trump, instead they searched for any answer outside of “we may be, in part, to blame” and landed on a bugaboo that towered almost as tremendously as Trump did: Vladimir Putin, the president of America’s 20th Century enemy, Russia, who seems to have rigged that country’s system so he won’t be going anywhere any time soon.
In an era where you all seem intent on resurrecting every conflict from the past, why not start a new Cold War with an old enemy?
Anyway, according to these Russigaters, the End of The World was caused by Putin and a bunch of pimpled Eastern European nincompoops who manipulated the algorithms and lack of oversight of social media companies to convince the gullible masses that Trump was the better choice than their resume warrior and voila, Hell, we have entered Thee.
Those are two of the bigger groups, but of course, there are many more. In fact, so many that I won’t spend any more time detailing them. Suffice it to say, those social media companies have — unwittingly — created a social fabric which is more than simply fraying, it is being torn apart as though a teething hyena has gotten hold of it.
And then along came 2020, a year even the dimmest amongst you humans already knew was likely to be a shitshow because of the election, but history has a funny way of piling on. And in this case, it came packaged as some sort of pandemic out of China about which, of course, none of you can agree.
What is it? What are the best ways to combat it? Is it even real? If it isn’t real, who are those people dying and what are they dying from? Are those hospital ships real? Or a figment of social media? To mask or not to mask, that is the question? Social distancing, a phrase none of you knew before March 2020, does it mean six feet apart and if so, why not make it nine? Or nineteen?
Besides, where did the virus come from? Sure, Trump called it the China virus and you all agreed it came from China but I’m talking about more details. How did it originate? Was it from bats? Or Batman? Or maybe Batman having sex with bats?
Moreover, are the tests accurate? Why did the inventor of the most commonly used test say the science of the invention wasn’t meant for diagnosing diseases? What is that all about? Is it better to quarantine the whole country? Or just beer halls, bowling alleys, and basement card rooms? Boston or Birmingham, Alabama? Both? If you did that, what about people’s livelihoods? How would they pay the bills? And, if people lost their jobs in a system where their health care is tied to having a job, how would they get help if they got this virus? Would they even bother? Maybe they’ll all start marching in the streets with machine guns, machetes, and martinis? For fuck’s sake, what are you all to do?
Of course, none of you should really be expected to know the answers, yet most of you took to social media as though you did. This has been one of the many ironies of 2020 and, for the hero of this tale (me), the reason I could no longer sit back and let humanity destroy itself. Because as I watched from my vacation villa on Venus back in mid-March, I could see that what had started as a localized shitstorm in central China had turned into a planet-wide feces-i-cane. And nothing is so destructive as a coked-up hurricane made of feces.
So at the end of March, I sent out an SOS to those who I expected to act on my, or rather your, behalf: the Teddy Bear Armada. They are simply the best at what they do and thus are highly sought after all over this galaxy. Even for someone with my contacts and superpowers, they were difficult to track down, but I managed to find them vacationing 1,000 light-years from Earth on HAT-P-7b, enjoying that exoplanet’s famed ruby and sapphire rain.
Before I go on, hopefully you’re clear on something: I’m not one of you. Oh sure, I disguise myself as a human, one who plays a disgruntled yet somehow extremely rich, unemployed Hollywood screenwriter who dabbles in short fiction. But I’m something else entirely. I’m not going to tell you what I am exactly, because it’s a need-to-know basis and for my species, the less you know the better. All I will say is I’m from the Pleiades and like the rest of my species, I am here to help you humans through these crazy transitional years, which sad to say, won’t be over any time soon. Why do I care? Well, if you make it, you’re gonna get entry into the Galactic Federation and, frankly, we need some fresh blood. For one thing, our political arena is nowhere near as exciting as yours.
And like I said, after spending the past few hundred years living amongst you as one of you, well, I’ve grown fond of you, even your foibles. And I’m tired of how so many species have reached the transition years but failed and gone the way of Atlantis, which means a Great Reset and, well, better luck next time in 10,000 years.
No, I couldn’t let that happen and so I took a chance, violating the rules of engagement by us Galactic Federation members concerning humanity. It’s really one simple rule: Don’t engage. At least not directly.
Personally, I think when you are done reading this tale, you may agree with me that I circumnavigated this rule, or at least that it’s doubtful I’m gonna get caught. But hey, I’ll let you decide.
I simply had to try. Because back in the spring, there was too much evil cackling and finger steeple-ing in the various halls of power for my taste. It felt too much like the playing field had been slanted against us, I mean, you.
I watched with utter dread as humans all over the world were locked into your abodes, sometimes with actual welding tools, allowed out to exercise way too infrequently, spied on by drones to make sure you didn’t break the rules, and getting hauled off to jail for daring to go surfing alone on the lovely beaches of Malibu.
As these things understandably caused tensions to rise, the scriptwriter for this Mother of All Disaster Tales decided to toss into the stew some unresolved racial issues near the end of May when a guy named George Floyd was killed because a cop sat on his neck for almost nine minutes and America — then the world-erupted in anger.
Again, I sent a message to Admiral Frank E. Furter, that long-time legendary leader of the Teddy Armada, and his answer was curt: “Coming. Hold your horses. Over.”
Furter’s a legend, but he’s underestimating things down there, I thought.
To recap: you had the Spanish Flu of the 1910s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the 1960s race riots all being re-enacted and it was still not even halfway into the year!
“Hurry up, Teddy Bears!” I yelled into the Venusian night, wishing that I’d built my vacation villa on Jupiter after all, where things were quite a bit cooler, because I was seriously overheating.
Fortunately or not, this remained the stew for that unsettling summer, a summer where cities such as Portland had riots by night and “mostly peaceful protests” by day and Seattle flirted with turning neighborhoods into cop-free zones — does the Summer of Love work on a Ball of Confusion? Let’s find out! — all while news stations ran a steady ticker tabulating the number of Covid-19 cases and deaths.
Before summer could burn off into fall, though, 2020 had one more card to play: how about some crazy-ass forest fires that will make Western cities like Portland, Los Angeles, and Seattle lead the world in bad air quality from all the smoke for over a week? “Take that China, our air’s worse than yours! USA! USA! US…(cough, cough!)”
Fortunately or not, I got a message from the Teddy Bear Armada saying they had finally entered the solar system in early September and were stopping on Pluto for a bit of R&R. This time, I held my ground, “GET. HERE. NOW!” Of course, I knew this message was a risk. After all, they had traveled almost 1,000 light-years in a matter of four months and no, they (and I) are not privy to tell you how they managed it. Just be glad they did.
“Just a few weeks,” was Furter’s response and I had to accept it because no one orders around the Teddy Bear Armada.
Throughout all of this, you silly humans took to social media to air your opinions, express your grievances, and collectively tell everyone else to “wake up!” But a lot of you said it more like “Wake the fuck up!” Because the best thing to do to someone who is sleeping is to yell at them to wake up, that’s sure to win them over to whatever perspective you’re preaching.
At last, rains came and cleaned up the air, at least in the Northwest cities, and it seemed like now all we had to deal with was the final several weeks before the U.S. presidential election. Easy enough, right?
Ha ha.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg decided she’d had enough of this and so passed away and that meant there was an opening on the court. Considering that some were forecasting the upcoming election will end up in the courts for all sorts of reasons but really because you’ve all lost faith in your system and in each other, well, having an even number of justices on the bench isn’t a good idea. Then again, that’s how many were on the court during the 2016 election and you survived that.
Or did you? Could this all be that first bad dream after death before you enter the light? My lips are sealed.
Still, it was one more combustible doll to add to the bonfire and it just turned the intensity up that much more.
And so it was that you all wondered if Ginsberg’s death was the infamous October surprise, even though it happened in late September.
On that account you were wrong. The October surprise was still coming.
And, when I first wrote this long-ass intro, none of you had any idea what it would be.
But I do. Because I masterminded it. And all I can tell you is, none of you will ever believe it and that’s why it’s such a brilliant plan, that’s why I’m going to get away with it.
And so here we are, ready to enter the telling of the tale which I’ve dubbed: The October Surprise, a.k.a. The Trojan Teddy.
Did I mention that Admiral Furter said most of the crew had turned feral during their flight?
I probably don’t need to mention that the members of the Teddy Bear Armada are cute. Really fucking cute. They are teddy bears, after all.
As your author, I’m more privy than anyone to the facts of this story, most of which I will reveal to you, but one thing I’ve been sworn to secrecy on is why these teddy bears agreed to this contract. Or how much I would pay them. All you need to know is they will be rewarded handsomely, so handsomely that this will likely be the last time they’ll be making any sort of appearance on Earth, at least for the sake of business.
Anyway, shall we carry on?
Because I’m kind of a sick motherfucker, I sent a message via a dream to one human about what was to come and she couldn’t do anything about it. Some would try me for torture if they only knew.
Her name is Veronica Der Vanderwhistle. She’s nine years old and lives in a slum outside of Manila with her grandmother, her older brother, Verlander, and a bunch of beetles. Not to worry, the beetles are in cages; they are simply something Verlander likes to collect and Veronica likes her brother, so she never complains about them.
Anyway, Veronica had been born in America — Guam, to be precise — to an American father who had gone AWOL from the U.S. military to pursue a career in the burlesque arts. This creative career change led him to Guam where he met his Filipino wife, a student he had been teaching English to to pay the bills while he got his artistic career going. Obviously, Veronica’s birth was nine years ago and in those years, her father’s career had taken off and, when their mother was cooking and not looking, he had flown the coop
So their mother had moved Veronica and Verlander to the Philippines when, three years later, she had been run over by a runaway donkey cart — outlawed since Duterte had been in power but still obviously on the streets — and so the siblings had been forced to move in with their grandmother and were barely scraping by.
Now if you expect it to make any sense why I chose to give this girl a precognitive dream, well, you haven’t been paying attention to this narrative. None of this shit makes sense. So if you are finding it nonsensical, you’re doing fine, passing the acid test, if you will.
So there she was, our Veronica, coming to consciousness on a muggy late September morning in Manila with a vision of the tale I’m about to tell and she had no idea what to do with it. All she could think of was to tell her brother about it on their walk to school, and Verlander had simply said, “another of your crazy dreams” and that was that. By the time they got to school, they both forgot all about it.
Until it happened.
Before I go on, let me be clear: this whole tale may or may not be true, but who’s keeping score? All I can say is take it with a grain of salt and twenty-two tequila chasers.
Personally, I prefer rum, which is one reason I settled on Venus rather than somewhere else. Venus is famous for rum and vineyards and skilled as you all think your scientists are, well, they’ve yet to discover this about the planet of love.
Anyway, my devious plan was all in place so I’d decided to escape for an evening with a dip in my flotation tank after ingesting a buttload of the horse tranquilizer known as ketamine. Some call this going down the k-hole, which is probably why an a-hole like me enjoys this pastime.
So when that pleasurable trip was interrupted by a buzzing in my ear indicating an important message, well, I wasn’t too pleased about it but out of the tank I came, only to find out there’d been a monkey wrench thrown into our plans: President Donald Trump had apparently contracted Covid-19.
“You don’t say,” I said, as I toweled off my head even though my actual body doesn’t retain enough water to require drying.
I wasn’t worried. After all, Admiral Furter was considered the best in his business and his armada was carefully chosen from only the finest teddy bears in the Milky Way. Even the ones who’d turned feral were top-notch recruits.
Just know that while I may be insufferable, I’m at least an honest broker and I’m going to give it to you straight in a way that will make you one of the select few to know the real story about what really happened with Donald Trump in that first week of October.
After all, I planned it this way. And yes, if you were again, carefully reading, you’d recognize I was trying to throw you off my scent a few paragraphs ago when I suggested Trump’s contracting Covid-19 was a monkey wrench of sorts. It was none of the above. The only people I wanted to fool was the Teddy Bear Armada because I was testing them. Wanted to make sure they would earn the reward I was paying them.
In addition to that, I’d made a bet with John Cusack. Let’s get to that, shall we?
—
Before we do, let me be clear: I’m not going to tell you how Trump contracted Covid-19. It doesn’t matter, even if he didn’t get it. All that matters is Trump believed he got it and began to act strangely as a result. Which made him the perfect target.
Now, let’s talk about Cusack and his role in this.
In late 2008, I first met Frank E. Furter and a few of the more elite members of the Teddy Bear Armada at a posh party at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch after watching a screening of the movie, “2012.”
“That’s not how it’s gonna go down,” said Furter, who is an extremely dapper teddy bear monkey who always wears a canary yellow cap with a brick red bill and compliments it with a matching canary yellow shirt with the words Curious George stenciled across the middle. He wears nothing below the belt, though.
The reason this party even existed was rather convoluted but I’ll do my best to make it clear. So the King of Pop was friends with a financier named Thomas Barrack, who had a loose connection to Roland Emmerich, the director of “2012,” and Jackson was still trying to woo Emmerich into allowing him to play the role of King Tut in a project Emmerich was pondering making. So Jackson, like the rest of us, suffered through that dreadful End of the World flick just to have a chance to talk to Emmerich about being King Tut. (I swear all of this is true, or at least based on truth. Look it up!)
Meanwhile, the lead actor of “2012,” John Cusack, had made a bet with his pal, Rob Lowe, that someday he’d take LSD in Neverland Ranch and so tonight he was going to get his chance.
Cusack has a gambling problem.
Now the only reason I was there was that Cusack and I went back to his “Better Off Dead” days, a movie I actually wrote but didn’t get credit for. Anyway, I’d known about Cusack’s bet with Lowe, and me and Cusack had been tripping together since the 1980s so he invited me along. Thus, I’d known that Cusack was going to gobsmack me with some good acid, but having a conversation with a crew of talking teddy bears only one hour into the trip was a sign that the legendary actor and my old friend had undersold his product. Regardless, as a lifelong psychonaut, I’ve learned to roll with the psychedelic punches and besides, I’ve always found teddy bears charming.
Like I said, this group called themselves the Teddy Bear Armada — they claimed to have actual spaceships and to be from a star system out past Sirius, but even I had a limit to my credulity. That said, I believed them. Besides, I didn’t want to be rude, and when you’re on good acid in a surreal place like the Neverland Ranch, what kind of person would you be to deny flights of the imagination in others, especially when you know such flights are possible because you are a pilot yourself?
There were about 20 members of the Armada at the party that night. There were several other monkeys who looked like Admiral Furter, and several sleepy-looking sheep, all of who were called Melu for some reason, some of whom appeared to be wearing baby clothes but most who just stuck to birthday suits of pastel colors — pink, purple, green, blue, black and yellow, and the yellow one had a curious habit of saying “Goddamn it, okay?” after every sentence. Last, the majority group was a bunch of bears who looked like undersized Ewoks and Ewoks are already pretty small.
They were a motley crew but were fitting in nicely into the Hollywood crowd and once again I was reminded that I’d chosen the right profession to disguise my identity as an illegal alien.
“So,” I said to Furter, “how will the End of the World go down if you are such a smarty pants?”
“I’ve never worn pants,” Furter responded with a cackle, “nor will I start now. Anyway, what’s that saying from your spy movies, ‘If I told you, I’d have to kill you?”
“Yeah, you got it,” I said.
“But you need not worry,” he said to me and winked with that cackle, which I knew meant he was on to me but wouldn’t rat me out. He wasn’t a rat monkey, after all, just a normal breed of teddy bear monkey. “You’ll survive.”
As Furter took a very large swig of swill that, from the smell of it, would have killed most mortals, I asked, “Just me? What about the humans?”
“They’ll survive this round,” he answered, gesturing to the cheesy “2012” poster behind us. “But things are gonna start getting a lot weirder afterward.”
“How so?”
“Well, their smartphones are going to make it so they are constantly on-line and that means they’ll end up better friends with people halfway across the world than those who live next door to them,” Furter said, sounding much smarter than he had a few minutes ago. “And that, my friend, will have all sorts of social and political ramifications.”
“Speaking of politics,” I said, “will Obama be re-elected in 2012?”
“Oh, sure,” Furter said, “But the 2012 election is boring compared to what comes next.”
“Which is?”
“This is all I can tell you,” Furter said. “In the 2016 election, a bunch of them will vote Donald Trump into the Oval Office. With a little help from his friends.”
“They’re gonna put LSD in the water on Election Day?”
“Maybe so,” Furter said. “I’ve already said too much. Melu Yellow, get your admiral another one, would ya?”
“On the double,” replied the jovial sheep, “Goddamn it, okay!”
Furter and I chatted a bit longer but he and his crew had to leave early for they were setting off on another of their cross-galaxy adventures, always the mercenaries, never the maidens.
Anyway, after the acid had peaked, I found Cusack, who was sitting next to the pool and caressing a plastic purple duck and asking it for directions to the after-party. I told him what I’d learned and that was when he suggested we make a bet on whether or not things went down that way.
When I told my old friend that he wasn’t being adventurous enough, he put the duck down and looked me in the eye, using all of that boyish charm that had made him one of his generation’s stars of the silver screen, “What, then, old friend, do you suggest?”
“I bet you that Trump doesn’t survive four years.”
“Four years from when?”
“The election.”
“So,” Cusack said, picking the duck up again and punching it in the face, “he won’t make it to the 2020 election? Is that the bet?”
“You got it,” I said. “He dies before the 2020 election. I’ll throw some icing on the cake — he’ll still be in office when he dies.”
“You’ve got a bet,” Cusack said and then turned back to the duck. “Where did you say that after-party was again?”
I’ve never much cared for after-parties and besides, I don’t trust ducks.
I never did ask Cusack if he made it there or not. I know he survived the night, though, because one decade later with the news breaking of Trump’s contracting Covid-19, I got a phone call from an obviously inebriated and aggravated Cusack, who simply said, “Are you behind this?”
“What?” I yelled, trying to hear him over my robot maid and her obnoxious vacuum cleaner.
“Trump’s COVID infection! Did you do this?”
“Of course not,” I said. “That’d be cheating.”
“I better not find out you were,” he yelled. “Not only don’t I pay cheaters, I don’t remain friends with them.”
“Not to worry,” I said. “It’s all happening according to God’s plan.”
What I didn’t tell Cusack was the god I was referring to wasn’t the guy with the flowing beard who lives in a cloud castle. No, the god was me.
Earlier on I revealed Chekhov’s financier and so now, according to the rules of writing, I must fire it.
You see, that same guy who’d played the role in setting up the apocalyptic shindig in Neverland, Thomas Barrack, was the guy who was going to unwittingly deliver Trump’s assassin to his room at Walter Reed Hospital.
You see, Barrack’s a Trojan. A USC Trojan, to be precise. Graduated in 1969. I don’t think he went to Woodstock that summer, which is why he was okay with the brown acid known as Donald Trump. Anyway, all of his kids went to that fabled Los Angeles school and now his grandkids were there, too.
And he’s also a long time pal of Trump’s. In fact, it was because Barrack was angry about a communist Negro named Barack Obama stealing his name that Trump hatched the whole Birther conspiracy (neither even won any spelling bees and thus never noticed that the two names were spelled differently).
Thing was, Trump wasn’t totally wrong about Obama’s birthplace — Obama hadn’t been born in Hawaii, but he wasn’t born in Kenya, either. No, he was born in the place that would eventually become my vacation villa on Venus. But Venus was declared a U.S. territory back in 1976, so Obama was all clear. Or was he? After all, he was born before that. I’m unclear on the rules. But really, who cares? It’s all past history and besides, that Barack’s only appearance in this story is in this paragraph.
Anyway, Thomas Barrack knew that Trump was a fan of teddy bears and also that he liked USC’s colors because it reminded him of fast food, which he was an advocate for.
“Looks like McDonald’s to me,” he’d said on many occasions when admiring the USC football team’s classic cardinal red and gold jerseys.
So it was that Thomas asked one of his granddaughters to go to the USC bookstore and purchase one of those cute USC Trojan teddy bears so he could give it to Trump with a Get Well card. She’d done her duty and sent the bear to her father, but that was where Furter stepped in.
Using more of the same kind of top-secret high tech that allowed his armada to travel over 1,000 light-years in five months, he intercepted the real Trojan teddy and had one of his crew, an intelligent orangutan teddy bear named Lucifer, put on the Trojan Teddy’s gear and hop into the gift box.
Then, on Sunday, October 4th, Barrack visited Trump and gave him the gift box, which included an order of steaming McDonald’s french fries, Trump’s favorite (and who, honestly, doesn’t love those delicious treats?).
“Looks like McDonald’s,” Trump said, seeing the fries and the Trojan Teddy Bear and Barrack laughed with his old friend, happy he’d remembered the joke and even happier knowing that if Trump was this sharp, he was going to survive Covid-19.
Again, like a lot of things in this tale, he was both right and wrong. Trump did survive Covid-19 despite what the mainstream news reported that Monday morning. No, it wasn’t the disease that killed him.
It was the Trojan Teddy Bear named Lucifer.
Here’s how it went down: On Monday morning, October 5, 2020 at 3:24 a.m. EST, Lucifer-dressed-as-Teddy-Trojan opened his eyes, checked that the coast was clear, walked to the bed, put his cute little paws around the president’s neck, squeezed, the president’s feet began to kick, he was able to croak out the ugly catchphrase of 2020, “I can’t breath,” Lucifer squeezed even tighter and, at 3:33 a.m., the president’s lights went out. Teddy Trojan made sure he’d left no traces of his teddy bear fur — he hadn’t — and then walked to the window, opened it, climbed out, closed it, scurried down the ledge, and strutted into the Washington, D.C. night.
He walked for two hours until he found the Teddy Bear Armada in a forest grove outside of Alexandria, Virginia, entered Admiral Furter’s spaceship, now shaped like a mushroom to blend in, was allowed by two of those sleepy sheep named Melu into Furter’s quarters and the great monkey dismissed two monkey-cubines who had been feeding him grapes grown in my Venus vineyard and looked into the eyes of Furter, simply saying the words the great monkey teddy bear had been hoping to hear:
“It’s done.”
It was about 24 hours later when Verlander Der Vanderwhistle was browsing Twitter on their family’s smartphone when he saw it: a Trump tweet from the night before, which was a picture of Trump, smiling mischievously from his hospital bed as he looked at a taco bowl in front of him. In the tweet, Trump had written: ““I still love Mexicans! #TacosCureCovid-19” and behind Trump in the photo Verlander saw it: there was a teddy bear with a USC shirt on. It was the teddy bear, it had to be, because his sister had told him the president’s assassin in the dream was a teddy bear who had a shirt on that “looked like McDonald’s colors.”
By the time Verlander saw this, though, the investigators had closed the case: Trump had died from Covid-19, had been added to the statistics as one of now over 200,000 other Americans, and the nation was in mourning. Or at least 35 percent of it was. Another 35 percent grinned and bore it, “it” being the secret joy knowing their version of the Wicked Witch was dead. The remaining 30 percent just looked to the heavens and asked, “Will this crazy fucking year ever end?” (A few of the more in tune ones heard a reply, “Yes, on December 31” and then some cackling.)
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden simply tweeted, “We are saddened to hear about the death of the president. #WearAMask.”
And Verlander knew there was nothing he could do, that if he posted the truth, no one would believe him and besides, why did it even matter? Trump was dead and that was that.
So he’d gone back to sleep.
Cusack visited me on Venus and paid off the bet, not bothering to ask me again if I was behind it all. That kind of disappointed me. I expect more from John Cusack.
A few days later, Furter arrived and I paid him. The sleepy sheep seemed happiest of all, though the Ewoks still had the best dance moves.
And there you have it, the real story of the October Surprise. You are one of the lucky (or not) few who now know the truth and nothing but the truth so help me, I’m god.
Can you do anything with it? Of course you can’t. But hey, such is the nature of 2020, right? Little good it does any of us to know what’s going on when the “what” is so goddamned unbelievable. You could shout this story from the rooftops until you were blue in the face and all it would guarantee you is a sore throat and a few “Shut the fuck up, alreadys!”
But still, the truth shall set you free.
And since you’ll be free, why not come visit me on Venus? As I’ve said, I’ve got a soft spot for you all. Once here, you can thank me for saving you and your lot from the chaos that Trump was about to unleash when he got his ass handed to him in the election because he refuses to accept that so many think he’s a real loser.
In case you haven’t figured it out, while I have admitted my soft spot for teddy bears, I’d prefer thank you gifts that are not teddy bears, just to be safe.
I got it! Like your deceased leader, I also like McDonald’s French Fries but they don’t have a store on Venus (yet) so that’d be a good party gift.
And, I’m gonna end this with some good news: On Venus, nobody argues over whether or not you need to wear a mask. If you don’t, you die on the spot. Why? Because unlike Earth, our bad gas in our atmosphere isn’t a metaphor. This makes Venus less confusing than Earth.
See you soon!