Bartholomaeus
In which we decide to get together, get drunk, and watch a director’s secret edit of a beloved holiday classic.
Holidays are the season for watching old movies again and again, relentlessly, like Sisyphus pushing dope on the corner of Hell & Vine, trying to glean some enjoyment or meaning from a product that has long been picked clean of both, like the flesh picked clean off a turkey-bone at some festive meal.
Illuminati Ganga Agent 77 here, I’m the host of this party in every reality it takes place in, and in every incarnation past and future. Tonight we’ll be watching the legendary “Bartholomaeus” — a movie about a football playing Turkey that saves a school of orphans from rich unscrupulous developers and tastes great with gravy!
There is only one remaining print existing in over 200 Universes in our current Multiversal axis of this movie. That print is composed of fragments of a black and white release from Universe Thelio and a color version from Universe Ghalio and is colloquially known as Bartholomew —
BUT
We will be watching a completely other version, a purer, more evil version extracted from the temporal trash that empties into the vast Aetherial sink from the axis of universes that directly mirrors our own.
A version not on our axis, a version hacked and stolen from — somewhere else.
Not that I’m going to let anybody know about that.
The Movie was directed by Fritz Lang, who had just recently moved to the U.S to escape the Nazi party, a memetic subsidiary of the Principality of Wavewrack and Fog.
This was his first American movie, released by RKO Pictures — the company that would also release his last two pictures While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
Notice anything about that company’s logo?
Yeah, me neither.
Thanksgiving Night 2022 — Inside
The Party starts at 6:30. In attendance are Agents 88, 18, 9, and 42 — Bill Fakespeare.
The menu is cheap beer, some Jarritos if you don’t want to get drunk, sour cream and onion potato chips and salt and vinegar chips separate bowls (mixed with psilocybin shrooms), and Chile-rubbed Turkey.
If you’re familiar with the original Bartholomew
This is very like that movie of course, except in this movie Bartholomeaus the football playing turkey is not playing American football, but the sport the world knows as football, known in some various realities as “Soccer”
This becomes important later, as in Lang’s version of the movie when the bankers, and their chief villain Mr. Scumbody, are represented as secret underground Nazis intent on overthrowing Democracy.
Important because the orphans in the Bartholomew found in our axis of the Multiverse beat the bankers at American football and thus beat the bankers at being American, but in this movie they beat the bankers at Soccer, thus they beat the bankers at playing the sport of the Nazis.
Movie starts at 7:10.
About an hour in Agent 9 shouts “This movie is evil, I have proof!” and runs out.
Thanksgiving Night 2022 — Outside
Agent 88’s Log — 9:17 p.m.
What’s the phrase I’m looking for — is it surreal? I’m surveiling 9 who made his way back here from Sarasota with a tracker worm.
9 is standing at the old McKinley Arms building across from Illuminati Ganga headquarters, he’s obviously scoping it out when what happens?! Of course I show up in the Protervus, down at the base of the building, hop out of the time machine and start clambering up the nearest rain gutter like a chimpanzee on a mission.
I gotta admit, sort of envious of past me. Actually that is weird too, I’m envious of past me who was in shape, but of course I was in shape back then so at the same time as I’m envying me doing what I remember doing I’m also nostalgic for being able to do it. Envy of yourself, and nostalgia for being the person you’re envying — this is an emotional cocktail only possible with time travel.
So 9 looks like he might like to take a shot at the younger me, and he starts to come out of the shadows and head over to the building as he sees me climb in at the window, when he stops. What’s he doing?
He’s looking at another guy, a sad looking mopey little nerdy type of guy who has run over from the corner of the building I am hiding at. Who the heck is this guy?
He runs over to the Protervus, writes a note, jumps in, drops the note on the ground and then winks out of existence.
9 runs over, picks up the note and then starts laughing, crumples up the note and throws it in the gutter and heads inside. He still has his key card. Shit. I don’t have my key card.
I run over and uncrumple the pager to read:
This is Just to say
I’ve taken your time machine
This is definitely where you left it
and its gone now.
I’m sorry but this is really my one
my only shot
at improving my life —
The temptation was just too great.”
I don’t get it, what the heck was so funny?
Also, what the hell am I going to do. 9 is inside, I can’t follow in and I don’t feel like climbing in. And then I realize — hey, all those years ago when I thought 77 was really on top of things and he’d had the Protervus taken away it was really this jerk stealing it.
And then I think — whoa, what if they never get it back, no wait 99 dropped 9 into the pool in Sarasota, but wait what if that was before it was stolen. Man this time travel shit gives me a headache, but it would be pretty funny if 99 never got his baby back. That jerk would be heartbroken, he’d have to be a regular guy like the rest of us.
I move back over to the shadows of the other building, sit back down and turn on the tracking for the tracker worm.
The tracker worm is somewhere in New York now, wtf, this mission has turned to shit in a matter of minutes.
Agent 9 stood in the shadows of the McKinley Arms. He’d been there for a while, watching the others show up — Agents 88, 18, 42 and of course himself, one year younger.
He checked his phone after 18 and 42 went up as they were last to arrive 6:43.
He remembered the movie started actually a few minutes after 7 p.m.
Sure enough he saw himself running out the building a little after 8 o’clock, so the schedule was holding the same as last time.
9 felt a strong urge to stop himself, tell him to calm down, not go down the path that would lead him to Sarasota and the 6 months of hell he spent there. But of course the paradoxical problems involved in that gave him pause and the moment was lost, anyway it was probably for the best. He had learned things about Steiner, about that movie, about the Ayhua, and end of the world. He didn’t want to risk losing that knowledge.
At 8:43, slightly over half an hour before the end of the movie 9 started to walk out of hiding when the Protervus rippled into existence with its well known multicolored effect on reality
9 retreats back into the shadows. A young Agent 88 climbs out of the copper-plated bathtub that was still slightly steaming from the recent traverse of the time stream.
88 has his modified Ninja shuko climbing claws with the gecko and magnetism enhancements on and starts to climb up the rain gutter with great speed and agility. 9 steps out of the shadows again, considering the payback he owes 88 and if he should shoot him but deciding against it, again because of potential disturbances to the time stream.
Then, from another corner of the street a skinny guy with a old black jacket, a hefty fanny pack, and thick glasses that reflect the streetlights comes running over to the Protervus. He picks up some paper and writes in it, and leaves it on the ground, hopping into the Protervus and quickly flashing out of existence. 9 laughed sourly, somebody had stolen 99’s time machine — well it couldn’t happen to a nicer fellow as the saying goes.
9 went over to the corner from which the Protervus had just disappeared, up above 88 had climed into the building, he picked up the slip of paper and laughed, whoever stole the time machine obviously had a problem with Illuminati Ganga, referencing the Scoundrel that Steals Fruit visualization project so directly could only be seen as direct provocation. 9 threw the paper away, it didn’t really matter, and headed in through the front door.
Scene: Stairs that lead from the first floor entryway to the Illuminati Ganga offices, somewhere between the first floor and the 3rd floor, I.G Agent 9 turns a twist in the stairwell and finds Agent 99 sitting on the stairs holding a high quality soup thermos, 9 vaguely recognizes the brand as one that 99 has been promoting during a couple recent time travel trips into the 1920s, getting pictures of the thermos slipped into historically important documentary footage of soup kitchens and the like.
Agent 9: You!?
Agent 99: No, Not me! You!
Agent 9: What?!
Agent 99: Nothing kid, just fucking with you. Something about your awful earnestness and bearing the problems of the world on your shoulders makes me want to do that. Anyway we gotta go (standing up)
Agent 9: Screw you, I ain’t going anywhere with you. You threw me out of your god-damn time machine above a pool in Sarasota — wait! Do you know about that or am I messing up the time stream.
Agent 99: No I don’t know about it and I don’t care, so it doesn’t make any sense to hold it against me, I haven’t done it and anyway it was technically a totally different person for that reason (stands, and starts walking, essentially forcing 99 to walk downstairs by his presence)
Agent 9: Yeah I gu.. wait…hah (laughing for a minute) Sucks to be you, we ain’t going anywhere because someone stole your time machine!
Agent 99: No someone stole the machine that idiot 88 left outside. My time machine is still cool and waiting for us in the basement.
Agent 9: Where are we going?
Agent 99: To wait out a great man’s long and lingering death.
Agent 9: That doesn’t sound like something I want to do.
Agent 99: Yeah but you’re going to (taking envelope out of vest pocket and handing to 9) Orders, and a good little soldier like you always follows orders.
On the ground floor, they continue through the side door that leads down in to the basement. To the Time Machine. To Newark, New Jersey. October 24, 1935.
This article was composed of fragments submitted by various agents, assembling these into a semi-coherent whole was done by IG Agent 86.
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