Charlie Bucket, 777

“I would be totally down with something really experimental too,” said the Scientist. As he said that, Face Off with John Travolta and Nicholas Cage came on the tv.

“Aren’t you reading Blood Meridian right now, that ultra violent Wild West book?” Asked the Friend.

“Yeah.”

“And you just recently watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, right?”

“Yeah, so?” Said the Scientist.

“So...what if there was a kind of Face Off situation...like, stylistically...with Blood Meridian and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?”

“First of all, I’m really fucking blazed right now. Secondly, what do you mean? Like the characters are switched? Their faces get switched, like a Deep-fake flick?”

“No,” said the Friend. “The style and content is switched. Basically, the Willy Wonka movie gets Blood Meridian’s characters, and Blood Meridian gets Willy Wonka’s plot.

“Dude, I can totally do that. With the time travel technology and the time-bending stuff I’ve been working on.”

“You can actually do a real Face Off thing with those two works of art? As in...after it’s done, everyone back here in the present time who watches or reads them will get the mashed up result of your experiment? History will be irreparably altered, to include any and all unintended consequences that might co-arise from that?”

“Yes,” said the Scientist before taking a massive toke of reefer.

…

The Scientist spent a week traversing spacetime. First he went back to 1971 when Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factor was made. Then he went to 1985 when Cormac McCarthy was writing Blood Meridian. He tread carefully upon the sands of time, as to disrupt as little as possible save the book and movie mashup. When he got back, his Friend came over.

“What’s up, bro?” The Friend said. “How’d it go?”

“Totally sick,” said the Scientist. “How’s everything been here?”

“Pretty funky man. I mean, nothing too wild, but you being back in time doing stuff...something’s bound to reverberate, man. Could definitely tell you were back there putting in work.”

“Oh, for sure,” said the Scientist.

“So, how’d it go?”

“Ok, so here’s what happened. When I got to 1971, Mel Stuart was already pretty far along shooting Willy Wonky. At first I thought about creating a morphic field — basically going even further back in time and taking a copy of Blood Meridian with me and trying to get Mel Stuart to read it when he was younger, in hopes that it would be planted enough in his subconscious mind that it would influence how he made the Willy Wonka movie. You know how when you create a morphic field, an event that happens once in spacetime is more likely to happen again.

“For sure,” said the friend, firing up the Volcano marijuana vaporizer.

“But then I realized that even if that did work, it was way too much effort and would take way too much time, and there was no guarantee Mel Stuart would even channel Blood Meridian when making Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

“So what did you do?”

“I created a synthetic timeline.”

“Nice!’ Said the Friend.

“Yeah. Basically I created an alternate timeline using artificial or synthetic spacetime material...a timeline in which Mel Stuart decides to make Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as a super wigged out McCarthy style piece. And then I smashed that timeline onto the original timeline, and hoped that organic timeline would eventually morph to accommodate the new synthetic one and not reject it as too foreign — which would be absolutely catastrophic.”

“So basically it was like a skin graft, but with time and space.”

“Exactly! It was like a spacetime skin graft.”

“Brilliant."

“Thanks, bro!”

“So, when I got to 1985, I didn’t even have to do a graft. Remember how a morphic field makes things that have happened once more likely to happen again? Well, get this, one of the effects of the 1971 graft was that Cormac McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian stating publicly that his inspiration for the book was drawn heavily from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”

"Holy shit, dude!”

“I know, right? So basically I stuck around the 80’s for a little while, but there wasn’t really much to do. So here I am. Back to the future.”

“Sweet, man. So you wanna check out Blood Meridian and Willy Wonka right now, see what happened?

“Definitely, dude. They toked up some vapor from the inflated plastic bag.”

"Which one should we do first?” The Scientist said.

“Let’s look at Blood Meridian,” said the friend.

“Ok, ok. Let’s see what we have here, the Scientist said bringing the Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece from the shelf.”

“Blood Meridian...or...the Evening Chocolatiness in the West.”

“Dude, no way!! It totally worked!”

See the child. The Scientist began reading. He is pale and thin, his name is Charlie.

“Nice,” said the friend.

His Grandpa Joe lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost.

"Dude skip to the Judge part."

"Ok."

You ever seen such a place for rain? The kid had been watching the Candy Man. An enormous man had entered the candy store. The Candy Man stopped singing.

I feel it my duty to inform you that the Candy Man is an imposter! Not three week before this, he was run out of Fort Smith Arkansas for having congress with a goat.

Why damn my eyes I’d I won’t shoot the son a bitch!

“This is super crazy," said the Friend.

“Ok check this out:" From the offside of those ponies there rose a fabled horde of mounted Oompa Loompas bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fever dream. One in a stovepipe hat with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil.

Oompa Loompa doompaty doo, they sang stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the Oompa Loompas so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying in sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows.

“That's some savage-ass Oompa Loompas, damn,” said the Friend. “Let’s the check out the movie.”

The Scientist looked for it online. Dude, super weird. I guess no movie called Willy Wonky and the Chocolate Factory was ever made. It ended up being called Charlie Bucket, 777.

“Weird.”

"Yeah, I’m reading about it on Wikipedia right now. So apparently Charlie Bucket, 777 was somehow anachronistically directed by Gaspar Noe. That’s that super grimy French director, right?”

“Yeah, does like filthy rape scenes and stuff.”

“So yeah, the movie was basically shown in porno theaters throughout the 70’s, but a lot of places wouldn’t even show it. It was rumored to feature real snuff.”

“Yikes,” said the friend. “Are you able to pull it up?”

“Let me see, said the Scientist. Not really trying to go onto the Dark Web just to watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, you feel me?”

Eventually they found it and turned it on.

“Jesus,” they said right away. “It started at level ten from jump street and just went harder after that.”

“Turn it off, hey?” Said the Scientist after about ten minutes.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” said the Friend.

…

The Scientist sat without moving. The friend looked at him but he would look away. He was sobered by what he had done in a foreign timeline far from organic spacetime and although his eyes took in the alien pictures about the television screen the greater void beyond seemed to swallow up his soul.

The Friend began channel surfing and noticed something was wrong. Dude...so much stuff I’m seeing looks different. It’s like every movie is mashed up with a book. Look at this.

Dazed and Confused was playing on some cable channel and it appeared to be mashed up with The Great Gatsby. The Friend kept scrolling. The Godfather, mashed up with the Old Man and the Sea. Jaws, James A. Michener’s Hawaii.

Oh my god, said the Scientist.

“You must have created a morphic field,” said the Friend. “By performing the spacetime skin graft and mashing up one book and movie, you caused many more books and movies to be mashed up too!”

“The Scientist looked over his book collection.” Same thing. Everything was a bit different.

“Hey, Face Off is on, said the Friend. Let’s see what that got mashed up with. Oh, interesting, it looks like Face Off was written and directed by that cool Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

“That actually sounds pretty good, “said the Scientist.

“Yeah, it does. We should watch that later.”

“Definitely.”

…

He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, Willy Wonka. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and shadow and he has a great favorite. He never sleeps, Willy Wonka. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.