Sherry approaches the candy counter. “It’s a shame they’re closed. I’m out of gum again.” She looks down through the cloudy glass at old, worm-ridden candy bars and popcorn. “Oh, my Lord.”
Kenny asks Joe, “Where’s our room? They have rooms upstairs or something?”
“No. You don’t get a room.”
Sherry pipes up. “You said it was a hotel.”
“No, I said it was where we stay for the night. I didn’t say it was a hotel.”
In the Terranova’s seating area, new arrivals are scattered in the seats, including Mexican illegals. Some of them are asleep.
Kenny looks around the dim theater. “We just sit here…all night?”
“Yeah. That’s it.”
“They show movies?”
“Sometimes they do. Maybe. I don’t remember.”
The Terranova’s torn, rat-gnawed curtain rises. With poor sound and film quality, a brief “commercial” is screened, showing a man’s exposed buttocks suddenly struck with a wooden paddle spiked with nails, leaving bloody punctures. A hand reaches in with a cloth and applies iodine solution. A woman’s buttocks appear and the process is repeated. Then the words: JUSTICE IN THE RAW! NIGHTLY AT THE ICE PALACE. Free Admission.
Martial music blares as the vaulted stone entrance to a huge sewer system, much like the fabled one in Paris, appears onscreen.
An invisible, deep-throated narrator speaks above the action: “Witchy Toe’s new punishment facility is a spectacle of enlightenment, so well-maintained that new arrivals can take a boat from the President’s Home to the Ice Palace without fear of fatigue and without stepping in anything unclean.”
Floating on a sewage canal, a pedal-powered, canvas-canopied tour boat glides into view, new arrivals pedaling as they gawk. Other new arrivals, of a low caste, march slowly along a ledge beside the canal, using long sticks to break up clumps of offal. A shower of condensation rains on them from the arched stone ceiling. Their prison tunics are soaking wet.
The tour guide stands at the helm of the tour boat with a megaphone. “Notice the rows of lamps, each provided with a silvered reflector. See how they light up the vaulted gallery and cast their reflections in the black, turgid water at our feet. Don’t the white-robed workers look like so many ghosts? People who have seen everything say this punishment complex is perhaps the most beautiful sight on this side of the world.”
Martial music continues to play as the clip film fades and the screen goes dark.
Joe says, “They’re not showing a movie tonight.”
Kenny says, “Let’s go to the spankings.”
Inside the Ice Palace, the ice skating floor is brightly lit. A sparse crowd shivers in the cold. A queue of new arrivals, nude and on skates, waits in line.
A booming alien voice, speaking English on the P.A. system: “On the ice now we have new arrival, Joseph T. Baker. For petty criminality — breaking wind in a public place.”
Baker, a flabby, aging white male, skates to a booth-like structure in the center of the rink, presses a red button and bends over. Extending from the booth is an oar-like projection about six feet long. From its flattened end, dozens of sharp spikes protrude. A spring-lock mechanism releases and the paddle strikes Baker’s buttocks with terrific force, at the same time spraying the bleeding punctures with iodine solution.
Propelled forward several yards by the force of the blow, Baker cries out in pain, his spluttering farts uncontrollable, driving him ever further on the ice. He weeps with shame and embarrassment. Most of the audience applauds.
Joe claps. “You better clap. You have to clap.” With all the clapping, Sherry and Kenny don’t hear him. He shouts, “Clap! I’m telling you. It’s the law! Believe me, we don’t want to end up in the sewer.”
Kenny says, “Fuck no.”
Kenny and Sherry clap half-heartedly.
A female new arrival skates to the booth and the paddling process is repeated.
The paddle strikes high, hitting her a glancing blow to the head and spraying her face with iodine. She falls, sliding across the ice, head bleeding, ear torn.
On the street outside the Ice Palace, Sherry says, “That was the weirdest thing.”
Joe says, “I’m remembering details now. They play by different rules here. The last thing we want to do is break one. That’s when they take you in for surgery. The problem is, the rules change all the time. They print the new ones in the paper. You gotta read the paper every day.”
Joe stuffs a few yellow bills into a paper machine and pulls out a City Moon. He looks at the headline: COMPULSORY WORK FOR NEW ARRIVALS.
Kenny scratches his head. “We gotta get jobs? All I know is trucking. Trucking is what I know. You see any big rigs around?”
“Forget all that. Whatever they tell you to do, you do.”
“They dump money from planes but we work anyway?”
“I told you. Different rules.”
As they enter the Terranova on the right side of the ticket booth, Moe exits on the left side.
Down a dismal street, Moe walks along, past one closed and boarded-up shop after the next. Just as the moon slides out of the sky and the sun rises he comes to a neon sign depicting a dancing skeleton holding a glass filled with white liquid.
Moe, dazzled by the light, ducks into the Bones Jangle Lounge.
At the far end of a long, narrow space, a human skeleton hangs on a stand at the rear of a small stage, bathed in a lurid red light from a spot above. Its mechanical dancing and the syncopated jangle of its bones provide lively ambient sound.
Down the center of the space is a series of eight raised tables, each with four sets of pedals. New arrivals sit drinking something thick and white while they pedal and chat. Some of them watch the skeleton dance.
Along one wall is a series of dispensers. Moe stuffs yellow money into one of them and from a hole an alien hand slides him a white drink. Drink in hand, he sits at one of the tables and pedals.
The lounge lizard, seated there in shabby clothes, looks half dead and slightly alien. He shows a horizontal scar on his chin and some scaling on his face. He says to Moe, “Nice suit. You look familiar. Do I know you?”
“I don’t think so.”
The skeleton stops dancing and a comely young new arrival woman slithers onto the stage in a beaded costume and begins a seductive dance, stripping as she goes, which gets Moe’s attention.
The lounge lizard says, “My suit’s at the cleaners. It’s a lot like that one. We’re men of taste.” He raises his glass for a toast, but Moe is distracted by the dancer, who has stripped to a thong, one large enough to support a huge cock and a whopping set of balls.
Moe has a sip of his drink. His lips pucker. “Yeah, men of taste…. What is this stuff?”
“Sour sheep’s milk. The aliens think we like it.”
In the lobby of the Terranova, Joe plays his saw near the derelict candy counter for a group of new arrivals, his hat full of yellow money.
In the seating area, Kenny and Sherry sleep sitting up. Sherry’s head rests on Kenny’s shoulder.
The sidewalk in front of a dilapidated department store. The usual queue of new arrivals has formed. A few mannequins in rotted, moth-eaten, fifties fashions remain standing in the display window. Others have fallen. Among them are two hungry dogs fighting over a dead rat. Moths flutter all about. A couple of swallows fly around feasting on the moths. Some of the new arrivals in the queue watch this museum-like diorama with passive interest. Others read the City Moon.
The toy department. A smaller queue of new arrivals waits in line amid spider-webbed shelves of dusty fifties toys. One arrival at a time approaches a mechanized alien, inserts a forefinger into its rubberized mouth and waits. Momentarily, the person winces with pain and withdraws the finger with a blood drop on its tip. The machine’s arm extends a small manila envelope.