Parry was dressed as a rabbit on that hot afternoon. A rabbit with a name and a history. Gogo Bunny, one of the Bigger entertainment empire's roster of trademarked bringers of joy. Not in the same league as Maggie Gnu or Zero the Dog, to be sure, but popular as adorably anthropomorphisized mammals went. Self-obsolescent lunch boxes, plastic tubes dispensing bland powdery sweets, stationery for teenage girls, polystyrene flavoured cereal; all these things and thousands of others bore images of the rabbit's big stupid head. Gogo was a nature spirit, a free-wheeling kind of guy in touch with his inner lagomorphic drives. Inside his fuzzy skin was a pissed off, overheated, sweating primate in his twenties whose job required him to wander through Bigger Amusement World dressed in thick grey funfur tat. Parry was determined to get through each day as best he could with minimum abrasion; the days he succeeded he went to bed if not a happy man, then at least a not unhappy one.
As he absently observed a group of South Asian Americans in their twenties eating clammy pre-filled lettuce and brie baguettes, he allowed himself to enjoy the strange kind of comfort which was sometimes to be found in the rank combination of cave and baked potato in a microwave that was Gogo Bunny's head. Ludicrous as it was the costume gave him a sense of identity through his very anonymity (I am not this stupid thing, I just wear his body, it is not my fault) and airless as it was it provided him with some breathing space. A space in which he didn't have to think. He liked that sometimes.
Parry headed away from the Fast Foods Of The World restaurant cluster, looking mostly at the ground so that he wouldn't have to see the saucers. No one else knows they're up there, he thought, then corrected himself: thinks they're up there. The heat. It's the heat. It's got to be. A subtle bob of the head to Marvin Monkey as they passed each other (don't you look stupid my hydrocephalic pal).
As he approached the Stalinist lite Bigger International Hotel, the trance of blankness invaded Parry's brain again as it often did whilst he was walking the Amusement World. Or when he was in supermarket aisles, waiting in queues, driving fast on the motorway, watching TV, making love.
Parry became more focused in the Family Plaza, where he found a disembodied head. It was a woolly cartoon pastiche of a gnu with its magnificent curving horns, sexy secondary sexual characteristic, reduced to useless foam appendages. Parry looked around in shock but there was no sign of the body that was supposed to be attached to the empty head.
The cardinal rule for all Bigger Amusement World cast was never to be seen out of costume. Ditto, especially ditto, the head. The Head. That was one of the absolute and non-negotiable commandments, that you were never seen dressed as one of the characters without your head. If you were, you didn't get the chance to exhibit yourself to the punters again because you were immediately outtahere.
If you needed reasons, they were available, in writing and usually on a sheet of paper with bulletted lists.
Because you've broken the illusion that the characters are anything other than totally real.
Because you've destroyed the earthshaking moneymaking magic of the Amusement World.
Because you're obviously seriously not in harmony with the traditional nuclear family values empowering dreams can come true day/weekend/week/month delete as applicable of a lifetime total entertainment experience Amusement World type thang.
Then he spotted a girl in chocolate coloured lurex tights and a shaggy brown wildebeest body vomiting into the Family Plaza's hi tech Orientalesque pool. Nobody except Parry seemed to notice. Even the man photographing his fluorescent pink brood by the fountain (I hope you realise you're inviting malignant melanoma, my friends) failed to heed the violently spewing half-gnu half-woman who must surely have appeared at the bottom left of the frame.
'Are you okay?'
(That has to be one of the stupidest things you've ever said in your life, Parry. Do okay people vomit?)
His chest tightened as the girl turned, weakly wiping the corners of her mouth on the back of one oversized white glove, and he saw who was wearing Maggie Gnu today.
Priscilla Kodak, unapproachably blonde, always smiling but piercing of gaze with it. Priscilla Kodak, whose liaison with Parry had seemed to him to belong more to the insect world than to his experience of normal human relations.
He noticed that the giant Koi had risen up from the depths of the pool where they habitually sheltered from the showers of tourists' pennies and were hungrily gobbling up the lumps in Priscilla's fresh hot puke.
At that moment she and the carp in the pool seemed separated at birth, with matching sets of bulging eyes and gawping gobs. Priscilla's overheated brain seemed incapable of processing what her eyes were seeing, vainly scrabbling around in the most neglected recesses of its memory for the most appropriate response to a seven foot rabbit enquiring after one's well-being. Instead of looking into the mesh covered mouth hole where Parry's voice came from, she stared deeply into Gogo's fixed synthetic eyes for a moment before her own became the eyes of a doll, wide and glassy, seeing nothing. She crumpled backwards slowly, like Sixties residential architecture dynamited at the foundations. She would have fallen in the water amidst the bloated fish had Parry not caught her awkwardly in his furry paws. The sign said Polite Notice Please Do Not Feed The Fish. Whatever.
With some difficulty Parry slung Maggie Gnu/Priscilla over one shoulder and plodded towards one of the many conveniently and discreetly located doors which led to the subterranean employees-only tunnels where they could escape, for a while, the thick heat which pressed down upon them both like a weighted tarpaulin.
No-one offered them any assistance. Nobody even seemed to be aware of a cartoon character carrying a semi-conscious girl dressed as a giant stylised South African antelope across the crowded Family Plaza.
When Parry thought to turn Gogo's eyes skyward, the flying saucers were gone. It was not the first time that Parry had seen them, and neither was it the first time he had wished never to see them again. They came and went at their convenience, not his, and he just didn't need that kind of bother.
Inside his huge head, the merciless heat of a midsummer afternoon continued to build.