Satan Burger (11 page)

When I was young, I liked to drop a cluster of colors into a paint bucket and watch them swirl around and into each other, color-motley, moving, LOUD.  And I kept swirling and swirling and swirling to see what spatter-storm of colors I would come up with, but in the end there was only one color and it was a murky purple-brown-puke that was very boring to look at.

I always thought that the only way to end racial prejudice was to melt us all down to one color, but now I think that God created racial prejudice so that his colorful paint bucket would not turn into a single, boring race.

Mortician is talking about a theory of his, so I go back to my corpse.  He’s talking about the
new
world that the walm people will make if the walm ever disappears.

"It’ll be a shitty place at first," Mort says.  "Too many races will produce a BIG ethnic war, and the race with the most people will probably be the first in power.  Of course, slavery will definitely come back.  The humans are perfect slaves.  They won’t put up a fight without their souls, no complaints, and they’ll last forever now that they can’t die.  New governments all over the world.  Different races will take over different territories.  And there will be wars for land and religion as usual.  The whole world will be a
new
place and the only memory of human civilization will be on the blank stares of the human zombie faces, working like machines until the end of it all."

"Do you think that we’ll be made into slaves too?" I ask.

"Probably . . . but hopefully not."

I leave the conversation and go back to peeping at Christian’s situation.  The idea Mort has put into my head is very disturbing and I want to ignore it.  I don’t want to be a soulless person, but it’ll be hard to be a slave with a soul, especially if I last forever.  But there’s always
hope
.  And hope is what I am counting on.

Christian is really getting wet with this girl.  He’s drunk and laughing at/with her, biting on her lip and shoulder.  Her stomach is hard with muscle, but she doesn’t seem like the muscular type.  More fragile.  Christian licks her fragile parts.

Creeper-hands caress to her breasts.  The breasts aren’t BIG at all.  They’re more like flabby pockets.  Almost all races have breasts, no matter how unusual they look.  I guess her race is one of the few that don’t.

Since there are no breasts for Christian to feel, he goes into her condom-like skirt and heads for the pubic region, and she reaches into his slacks and heads for his.

The two faces flash with alarm . . . then disgust . . .

And the girl’s boyfriend - or maybe he’s her ex-boyfriend - appears behind Christian.  Time for a pummeling.  I don’t realize what’s going on until I see the male species with very large muscles and large breasts - female breasts - and so I seep into the girl’s underwear to make sure.  I find a penis inside.

The gender characteristics are the other way around in this race.  The males are the soft pretty things.  And the women are the diesel beasts, hard and tough - men with breasts and vaginas.

Both Christian and the girl-male he’s been sexing up begin spitting out each other’s flavor.  Christian smacks the boy across his face, grinding his teeth and
crazed
. . .

All the people around him are rage-laughing.  Music starts up as the power-large woman takes Christian off of her man and throws him into a band of dancing Hogs.  And Christian drunk-chuckles at the manly woman, who won’t fight Christian anymore.  She knows he is a man, and in her race gentlewomen don’t hit men, no matter how ugly they are.

Christian is slurped into a breaker of dancing Hogs. The hogs wrench him onto their shoulders and flaunt him around the scope.  We are the RICH and deserve to get crazy with joy, because we can afford it.  Christian, in his dirt-rich suit, gaggles at me.  Screaming, "Come on, come on."  And I’m pulled in with Mortician and a bunch of other Hoggians.  Into the carousal.

Then the whole pub becomes a fury of movement, with food drippling from Hog chins, drunken women ripping off their clothes and showing off sweaty pale bodies, and everything in the room becomes a crowd of moisture, an orgy without sex.  Pure indulgence.  The music drive-piercing the ecstasy. 
Laughing screams
.  BIG smile across Christian’s face.  BIG, BIG smile . . .

A Hoggian woman with wicked eyes pours some liquor down my corpse’s throat, molesting my stomach while I’m out of my body.  I go back to gorge into her, but she’s already gone to the next man.  So the body tours into the sweaty food carts that usher the shuffle-prancing mob, with several other Hogs, scoop-pressuring the pies and meats into my mouth.  I’m not hungry.  I do it for
fun
.  And I gobble so fast that I don’t even enjoy it, but that’s not the point.  Then I dunk my face into a bowl of fruit liquor, flogging bubbles.  My wetness drizzles inside the liquid.

Next: body twitchings, I throw the cart over and cackle into the Hogs that were eating there.  They laugh with me, hopping on the wasted larder - a joyous performance.

And the Hog World dance takes me over again, sweeping my conscience away,
away
. . . Drifting with my rolling life, my round-a-go crowd.  Spin-happy, Mort and Christian take to the top, pouring me onto a balcony with a round-faced belly woman packaged around me, sinking into my skin like so much butter,
warm
.  I stand whooping with her at my waist, dizzy-balancing, smiling.  She’s very pleasurable against my skin, though a half-ugly race for the most part.

Then, up here above the crowd, I stare out whirlpool.  Looking on the bacchanal-tingle, on the RICH indulging faces.  I smirk.

Beyond the happy crowd, I gleam the outside windows, where hundreds of parasites have gathered, smoldering eyes tearing into me, faces pressed against the glass.  Poor, poor, poor.  I put an end to my smile and go inside my head.  At this time, the parasites have sadness and we have happiness.

If all of us were to agree to let them in they would have some of our happiness, but we would get some of their sadness, and we would all be at the same level of emotion.  However, we would be compromising our happiness to end their sadness, which is not appealing to us, even though it is the
even
thing to do.

After the moment for pitying the poor slips away, I go back to the
fun
.  It was a good, fair idea for me to come up with, but since I’m at the TOP and want to keep my happiness and my luxury, I’m willing to sacrifice the poor ones to the cold.

Richard Stein always said that nobody deserves to live in the cold. But right now, I really don’t seem to care. 

Scene 11

Another Day In Oblivion

Today, when I wake up with my brain squishing into the back of my skull - Hog World gave me a nasty hangover, with some sour muscles and a bruise - I decide that I’m inside of oblivion instead of reality.  I have said oblivion is the worst place in the world to be, but it is okay when you are only pretending.  While you are nothing, there’s not much to worry about.  And doing without worry is the best possible thing I can do for myself.

I say:

"I am in nothing."

This is a very relaxing thing to say.  All my nerves trickle right out of me, because
nothing
has no nerves at all.  I wrap my whole corpse in a cocoon of blankets, pressing my skin into a small comfort.  Only my face feels the fingering draft.

I decide to sleep like this all day, going in and out of actuality.  There is nothing more important than being in a dream world when the conscious world is horrible as it is.  Christian comes in and out of my closet/room every half hour to see if I’m up for some ugly fun, but I tell him that I’m having all the fun I need for today.

Christian whines and leaves, back to watching old reruns on the pawnshop television.  I don’t need to explain why they only play reruns on television.  There hasn’t been a new show for at least three years, which is why I only watch Battlestar Galactica.  Christian watches Hart to Hart and The A-Team.  Sometimes, while Christian watches The A-team, I wonder if Mr. T is like the rest of the world - boring and emotionless.  Christian thinks it isn’t possible for Mr. T to get boring, because Mr. T is a national icon, and should’ve been the messiah instead of Jesus Christ.

I remember that I’m supposed to be in oblivion and not allowed to be consciously aware of the terrible things in the world, such as Mr. T losing his soul.  I try to empty my mind. Then I let my eyes put me back into the sleep world again.

Inside of sleep world, I decide I am a butterfly that gets raped by a dragonfly girl in midair.  Then a frog slurps us both up and its stomach acids dissolve us as she continues her sexual assault.  The dream lasts for about two seconds and then weaves into one where I am five aristocrats eating a sausage.

At work, it isn’t so easy to pretend I am in oblivion.  I can’t work the register if I’m
nothing
, it’s just not possible.  I decide that only my mind is in oblivion - only because I have decided that - and my corpse is a mindless zombie that can still perform simple zombie tasks like typing and passing out food.  Hopefully, the rolling world doesn’t make me remember I am Leaf, spilling me into the real world, which is where I don’t want to be.

The early shift - Gin, Nan, and Vodka - is still here.  Leeching at a BIG rounding table with Satan, drinking storm-warnings and eating beer chips.  Apparently they’re not interested in going home for the night.  Instead, they want to get drunk-happy and be party maniacs all tonight inside of the Satan Burger, while the rest of us work.

But, since I am nothing, I don’t care to mind them now. Mort, on the other hand, complains, as usual, about the usual.  If he isn’t making fun, nobody should be making fun. But I don’t blame Mortician for his bitchy attitude; it’s in his character to act that way.  Without his bitching, he would be as boring as the rest of the world.

Mort hammers at some syrup ants who have invaded his kitchen.  Syrup ants are a very pesky type of ant.  They are BIG like fingers and have large butts filled with syrup.  In the world they came from, people would squeeze the syrup from their butts and put a collection into bottles.  On the label of these bottles would be the words: "Syrup Ant Syrup," with a BIG cartoon syrup ant smiling away as his syrup-butt poops on a stack of pancakes.  However, on their planet, pancakes are made from sawdust, because flour doesn’t exist there, not to mention that wood is one of their four basic food groups instead of breads and cereal.

As he hits them, their butts explode and a pool of syrup occurs, getting his counter goo-sticky.  Tiny drops of the sweet juice slop onto his wrist skin, pasting the hairs together.  And nothing frustrates Mort more than having pasty wrist hairs.

Mortician decides there isn’t time to bother with the ants and sends a demon stapler and a demon meat cleaver after them.  These objects have never eaten syrup ants before, but they are willing to try anything with syrup in its butt.  At first, the demons chomp at the air, spinning in circles, unsure how to work their invisible legs.  Once they learn the how to move, however, they gobble up the pests no problem.  Exploding the ants in their metal jaws, leaves the counter a gooey mess.  Mort continues his working and bitching.

I come out of oblivion and hear this:

"WHAT THE HELL DID YOU TOUCH HIS PENIS FOR?"

I see Nan in an argument with Satan.  In my rolling vision: three stretched figures like radio wax, melting into each other with their screams at each other.  There are three distinct voices: Satan’s is calm, Gin’s is a choking cry, and Nan’s is a hysteric shriek, like a mother whose seen her child ruined.

"I didn’t touch it," Satan replies, shaking his head childishly.

Nan unzips and drops Gin’s pants to reveal a dancing worm, "Then how the hell did it come alive?" she says.  The worm wiggles excitedly.  Its mouth has developed from Gin’s pisshole and Gin’s bladder is now its stomach sack, two small eyes on the sides of its head, quite like a snake’s.

"I’m sorry," Satan says.  "I couldn’t help myself.  You know, it’s not easy being the only gay person left.  I have urges that are hard to resist."

"Well, you better resist," Nan argues.  "Gin is mine.  And he’s not like you.  Only I can touch him in that way.  Why can’t you stop touching him?  You’re turning him into a freak.  Why can’t you leave him alone?"

"I didn’t think he’d mind," Satan says.

Nan seems more upset by the situation than Gin, shouting and mewling like it’s
her
penis and not Gin’s.  Actually, that’s basically the truth.  Gin and all his parts are Nan’s personal property, somewhat like a slave’s parts would be.  When Gin is looking shabby or unclean, Nan will order him to shower and put on fresh clothing.  Until now, I never realized that she had
complete
control over him.  I always thought Gin was a free-spirited guy who refused to be held down.  But things are clearing.  I don’t know if Gin has become this way recently, just after his death, or if he’s always been like this and I just never realized it.  Maybe he’s losing soul, losing his will to resist her commands.  If I was in his shoes, I would give up hope altogether.  Maybe I’d even embrace oblivion - the
real
oblivion.

"What the hell am I supposed to do with a living penis?" Nan says, shaking Gin’s penis around.  "It’s not going to work right.  I need a real penis, not a snake attached to Gin’s body."

Satan doesn’t seem to care.  He says, "I don’t care."

"You better care!" Nan yells.  "You keep touching and touching and touching but you don’t take responsibility for the things you make alive.  You better figure out a way to put him back to normal."

Satan shrivels his lips.  "There’s a person who can lift a demon spirit out of an object.  But I haven’t spoken to him in years."

Satan goes on to talk about his twin brother. He is supposed to look exactly like Satan, but his complexion is pale and he’s not a homosexual.  And just like Satan, his touch is magical.  But instead of a touch that makes things alive, his touch makes things dead.

He has the touch of death.

And the man’s name is
Death
. 

Satan and Death were both created to perform specific jobs in the world.  Death’s job is to touch people when they are supposed to die, making up some ridiculous cause for each death.  Sometimes he touches people to give them a heart attack, sometimes a car accident, sometimes a bullet in the head; it all depends on what seems reasonable to Death at the time.  Sometimes Death screws up and gives a little girl a heart attack, or once he had a young mountain climber who was falling to his death die of natural causes. One of the world supervisors (those angels in blue suits, red ties) got on top of Death’s case for that one, and suspended him for three months.  During the three months that Death wasn’t working, nobody died.

Satan’s job is to collect and separate the souls from the people that Death touches.  He puts them into two groups: good and evil.  The good souls are the ones that the rest of the universe can use, so they’re sent to heaven to be processed.  The evil souls are either recycled and used for soul-fueled machines like the walm, or Satan keeps them in hell.

Satan and Death haven’t spoken to each other in years.  They never really got along. Death thinks that homosexuality is unacceptable.  So unacceptable that he created a disease called AIDS to make men think twice before having sex with other men.  Death was almost suspended again; once his supervisor found out that he was being discriminatory on the job.  But there were people that needed to be killed, so Death only got a decrease in pay.  And to make things right, Death had to make the AIDS virus just as common in straight sexual relations as it was in gays.

"Death has no prejudice," was once a very popular catch phrase, but it was obviously written by a man who had never shared company with Mr. Death.

The catch phrase was meant to scare people away from dying.  It didn’t work. People were still becoming dead.

"So your brother can make him normal?" Nan asks Satan.

"I don’t know.  I don’t speak to him anymore," Satan replies.

Christian decides to make a fort underneath one of the tables. He can’t work ten minutes without taking a twenty minute break.  The engineers that made Christian did not take durability into consideration.  They just molded and bolted him up in the cheapest way possible and shipped him here.  So you can’t really hold Christian accountable for his laziness.

Christian’s fort is designed to prevent industrious people from verbally assaulting him while he relaxes inside of it.  The design doesn’t work, though, and unfortunately, he’s too lazy to try and fix it.

Which is why this discussion takes place:

Satan complains to him, "Get back to work.  I don’t pay you to sleep and make table forts."

Christian says, "Screw off.  You don’t pay me at all."

Satan says, "You won’t get any souls if you don’t work for them."

"I don’t care.  What do I need souls for?"

"Don’t be an idiot."

"Go to hell."

"I’m going to fire you."

"I’m going to kick you out of the warehouse."

"I’m serious."

"
I’m
serious."

"No, I’m more serious."

"I’m 150 percent serious."

"I’m infinity percent serious."

"I’m going to punch you in the stomach."

"I’m going to punch me in the stomach too."

The argument continues but nobody wins.

I take my break from work - and oblivion - outside and decide to smoke another Carlton, pissing out by the dumpster which coughs at me in disgust.  For some reason I feel
good
.  My eyes rolling, breathing in the cold air and then some of Carlton’s temperament.  Nicey thinkings run wild inside my blood. 
Sharp
emotions.  I look up to the clouds - an attractive day, even with life so glummy and sick.

Then I see a storm on the horizon.  Headed this way. Blue lightning bolts with curvy rounds, like noodles, and instead of raining water, I see it will rain madness.

The storm will go for eighteen days, not stopping until everything is wet and insane. A blubbery storm.  I can smell its odor from here.  My eyes open and then close a few times.

In the background, the walm licks its fleshy lips with anticipation, hungry for the force that makes men move.