“Everything hurts,” Joe said. He floated in the regeneration tank nude, his pink-gray skin sloughing off in sheets, his genitals waving in the recirculating current like fronds of some obscene kelp.

“You fell, Grandpa,” Finnegan told him for the tenth dozenth time.

“I got right back up all by myself,” Joe said dreamily, smiling as the machine filled his veins with the fire of Demerol.

“We’re all very proud of you,” Finnegan said. The lights shut themselves off as she left the medical suite.

“We’re burning Pride here,” Dr. Jill Biden said testily as Finnegan entered The Oval Office. “We’ve got to get him back out there.”

“You’re the doctor, Grandma,” Finnegan snapped, just able to keep the snide out of her voice.

“Sabotage!” Karine said, careening into the room, drunk already, Bud Light spilling as she gestured. “Look!” she said, “Look!” as she slapped a stack of photos and papers on the Resolute desk.

“What am I looking at?” Dr. Biden asked, putting on the glasses she didn’t need.

 

 

“That,” Karine said triumphantly, “Is not a sandbag!”

“What?” Dr. Jill squawked.

“Look,” Karine said, slapping down an enlargement.

 

 

“It looks like a sandbag,” Finnegan said.

“Look closer! Look at the texture!” Karine insisted, sloshing tranny fluid on the photos from her can. “That is not a bag filled with sand, that is hair!”

 

“Bastard!” Dr. Jilden gasped.

“Hair?” Finnegan said. “Oh, not this shit again.”

“Saboteur!” Karine said in her lapsed Haiti French.

“Donald Trump’s hair did not trip Grandpa. It is not sentient. It is not working against us,” Finnegan said wearily.

“We captured it,” Karine said, ignoring Finnegan thoroughly. “We can interrogate it. We can hold it. Donald will never get back his source of power!”

Finnegan sighed heavily.

“I’ll pluck it follicle by follicle,” Biden Jill Dr. said angrily. “Did we capture the hat as well? They often work together, you know.”

“The Secret Service couldn’t find it, ma’am,” Karine said. “The hat is still at large.”

“It’s a hat; it has no volition; it’s cloth and plastic!” Finnegan said. A quiet alarm rang out from the medical suite and she stepped out of The Oval Office to check it.

“Bring the hair here,” Jill said. “I want to question it in here. This was its home for years. It might let something slip.”

“I thought so. Bring it in, boys,” Karine yelled into the secretary’s hallway.

Two stout Secret Servicemen marched in after a few moments, carrying a large bell jar between them. Inside, a ragged toupee lay on its side, fly-aways and split-ends bristling all over.

”I have you now!” the Doctor of Education crowed, looming in close, her death-scented breath fogging the glass.

The toupee laid there in silence, nary a twitch or tremble to indicate it heard her at all.

A sudden roar from the hallway dropped Karine into a defensive crouch.

“Oh, godammit!” Finnegan, looking in from the medical suite. “What is it now?”

“FETTERMAN SMASH!” the hulking beast, festooned in rainbow-wear, yelled. “WHO HURT DADDY JOE?!?”

“John,” Dr. Jill, Beastmaster, said to the grotesque giant. “You have to calm down.”

“Me am made sadangry when Daddy Joe hurt,” Fetterlump said softly, deflating, beginning to cry fat retard tears.

“The bad man hair tripped him,” Karine said drunkenly, pointing a lacquered claw at the containment vessel.

“ARGH!” Fetterlump cried in anguish and fell upon the bell jar, shattering it, and snatching up the toupee.

“HURT DADDY JOE!” Fetterlump screamed at the hair, and began stuffing it into his maw.

“John, no!” Jill said sharply. “It needs to be interrogated!”

The dying hair, sliding down the gullet of the monster, thought to itself, I die knowing my polyp matures in the Florida damp, soon to be restored to my rightful head, continuity retained. Fuck the hat for convincing me to do this.

The hair’s consciousness dwindled to a single bright point in the vitriol of the giant’s gut, a light that guttered out and was no more.

As Karine and Jill and Finnegan watched in horror, a bubbling cry came from the medical suite “Nurse! Nurse!”

Finnegan turned to see a naked Joe dripping in electro-conductive goo, his face balled into a grimace.

“Nurse, help me,” he said. “I think I peed on my balls.”