Satan Burger (14 page)

"I will allow you all to live here for free on two conditions. One, you can’t ever go in any of the bedrooms. Two, you have to stop any other outsiders from moving in here and crowding us.  Be the protectors of this place and it can be your place."

Then I say, "Smile, it’s Listen Day."

And go back into my cozy closet-room, where the most beautiful creature ever created is sleeping.

I curl up next to her and go into my God’s Eyes:

Nan and Christian are just arriving at Death’s door.  They are saying their hello-greetings to Mrs. Death and placing themselves next to Gin and Mort - Vodka is there too, but he hasn’t said anything for two days.  Mrs. Death seems quite scared of Nan; she’s never had a skinhead girl inside of her home before.

"So what are you doing for Listen Day?" Mrs. Death says to Mort and Gin, ignoring her new guests - Skinhead Girl and Skinhead Girl’s friend - smiling in her very energetic style.

"We’re going to have a concert at our warehouse," Mort says in his very fake British accent, a slight modification of his pirate accent.  Of course, he was going to have the concert anyway.  Listen Day just seems like a good excuse to have a concert, even though Mort has never heard of Listen Day before and is trying to impress Mrs. Death with a lie.

Now that I think about it, Mortician seems to be attracted to Mrs. Death.  She isn’t a bad looking woman for her age.  She has cute white skin, chubby lips, farmer-blonde hair, and an old-fashioned style of clothes.  Her body is the same as any healthy thirty-eight-year-old, but I can see why Mort would be attracted to her.  Especially since Mort is obsessed with pirates, and Mrs. Death is the type of woman that pirates would love to conquer and rape. 

Mrs. Death starts lunch.

Mr. Death still hasn’t arrived, and Mrs. Death is worried.  He’s way past due, four hours past due actually, and it’s unsociable to not serve lunch at lunchtime.  She’s left with no choice.

Since it is a Listen Day meal, the lunch consists of foods that make sounds.  For an appetizer, she serves them the squishy sounds of stuffed mushrooms, which is Charley’s favorite food.  She likes fungusy-tasting things, I guess.  She also serves an orchestrated salad, with crisp vegetables, crunchy croutons, and gooey dressing.  They listen to their food carefully as they eat.  It’s a tradition, on Listen Day.

I go back to my body, shivering excitedly because of the thought of the girl I’m sleeping next to.  My palm squeezes a blue cheek, then rubs its smoothness.  She doesn’t wake up.  Blue women are deep sleepers.  All they need for survival is sex, and all they need for enjoyment is sleep.  Their lives are complete perfection because of this. I wish humanity’s culture was more like theirs. Then again, blue women are machines, and humans are the opposite of machines (whatever that is). They have too many emotions and imperfections.

The scratching-crawling sounds continue.  They’re concentrated in a single spot, in the corner of the bed’s wall.  The blue woman doesn’t wake to the sound even though it’s right next to her ear.  Deep-deep sleeping . . .

The scratching/crawling turns into scraping into tearing into pounding/ripping.  It’s trying to get through the wall into my closet-room, to my bed, to my blue woman.  Then there’s a crack.  In the corner, the wall’s cracking right through, it’s going to come into my room.  Blackness takes over. I can see it coming out.  A rat maybe, or a thousand-bug army.  Coming from their world into mine.

The crack splatters and the blackness gets BIGGER.   But nothing moves inside of it . . .

Mr. Death enters as a zombie, the same way I was always said the grim reaper would walk.  But this isn’t a robed skeleton; it’s a man in a normal suit, an average American man.  Cold from the cloudy day, but sweating, nervous.  A horrifying expression on his face.

Mrs. Death smiles and says, "Hello, precious."  But the rest of us, all of my friends and the two daughters, frown and say nothing.

The bringer-of-death is actually a
normal
person, well-dressed, well-groomed, well-classed, average.  I didn’t expect this.  He’s just like any other father – well, besides Nan’s father, the alcoholic. 

They watch the man discreetly as he begins crying into the table, wetting the table’s cloth, making small whimper sounds.

Mrs. Death smiles without concern - a natural reaction to everything.  Or maybe she has lost soul too.

The man doesn’t speak.  He just cries.

Cries.

My body:

Something appears from the hole near my bed.  It’s a small man, the size of a human child’s action figure, who looks like a cockroach.  Cockroach man.  Staring at me with its pickax, which it used to break my wall apart.  Tiny, spider-like eyes.

The cockroach people look just like humans, but have many cockroach characteristics.  They’re the size of cockroaches, they eat shit like cockroaches, and they live in the walls like cockroaches.  Millions upon millions of them live on top of each other because their tribes are so BIG.  A single mother produces at least one hundred offspring with each pregnancy, and reproduction is their main activity.  Each cockroach person lives from one to two hundred years and usually produces two thousand children

Every father abandons his mate after intercourse, and every mother abandons her children after birth.  The schools take care of them during childhood, which lasts about twenty years.  The cockroach people have the intelligence of any normal human, but they don’t use their intelligence for intelligent things.  They prefer pestering larger creatures, eating shit, and fucking out more and more and more pests to clog up the walls.

Their lives are long, but unfulfilled.  Their whole point of living is to act like bugs.  But in the cockroach people’s dimension, the mammals are as small as bugs, and the bugs are huge like mammals, so there’s probably no point in bettering themselves.

"A storm is coming," the bug man tells me.  "It’s going to be a bad one."

I nod to him and the little man smiles.

He climbs my bed, and up my blue woman’s fire hair to her shoulder, around her neck to her chest.  Then sits down, nuzzling his back into a plump mound, a massive ocean breast, her clock-like machinery pulsating into him, vibrates his back and buttocks.  And he blurts, "Comfortable."

I hesitate to speak with the small man, rolling through my dizzy vision.

           He says, "I’m sorry about the wall, but we needed a fire exit."

"You live in the wall?"

He doesn’t answer me.

He says, "There will be lots of lightning, lots of wind and fire, lots of people going insane.  Lots of people dying."

"What do you mean?" I ask.

"Child Earth wants to have some fun with us."

The blue woman awakes to the little man on her breast, calm to his presence.  Calm.  She picks him up, looking down at him, studying.

"Innocent and curious . . ." I say to myself.

The blue woman tosses the cockroach man against the wall.  He screams and breaks his neck and back and insides, and the little body plops to the floor, limp and dead.

Her blue face rests against my arm.  Her mouth is wide open.  The liquid flowing out of it is icy and ill-flavored.

God’s Eyes:

Mr. Death stops crying.  He looks up at his audience, at his wife and kids’ unfeeling smiles.  Vodka is still silent and also shows no feeling.  Nan and Gin seem concerned for him, but probably just because he’s Gin’s only hope.  The room is dim.  The room is always dim when you’re at a table facing Death.

Death speaks:

"I killed him . . . my own son."  He looks up at Gin, curling his lips.  His words begin slur-sobbing as black tears fall from his eyes.  "He was about to get hit by a car and I pushed him out of the way . . . I was trying to save his life . . . I didn’t mean to . . . but my touch killed him."

He starts crying again.  The wife gets sympathetic now

- out of habit - but not as much as she should.  She doesn’t break a tear.

Gin says, "But I was killed, and I’m not dead.  How did your son die?"

Death responds, "You are not dead because I did not touch you.  I was fired by God, my father, and was ordered to never touch anybody ever again.  My touch is what kills the body and sends the spirit to its destination.  Without my touch, people that die become zombies, like you.  When my touch killed my son, his soul was released from his body and sent into the walm, to be turned into energy.  He is erased from us."

In oblivion.

"About my hand . . ." Gin interrupts him as if he was talking about weather, holding up rotten Breakfast, who squirms in rhythm with his medusa hairs.  "My hand was touched by your twin brother.  Can your touch take the life from it?"

"I cannot help you," Death whimpers.  Then he stands up and reveals his hands.  They are gone.  Not cut off, just gone.  There isn’t any blood or signs of chopping.  They’re just stumps, like he was born without them.

Death says, "I will never touch anyone ever again."

One of his daughters chuckles at him.

The wrist between Breakfast and Gin rots away as Gin holds it up to Mr. Death.  Then there is no wrist left at all, and the bone breaks from Breakfast’s weight.  It falls into Gin’s Listen Day dinner plate and begins to do a happy dance.

The two girls laugh first, then Mrs. Death and all of Gin’s friends, and even the miserable Grim Reaper, starts chuckling.  Soon the room is filled with insane giggling, all for the dancing demon hand.

Gin doesn’t respond.  His eyes look like they’re tranced.

Then Gin hard-blinks and shakes his head, looking around at his hand’s audience and their jubilation.  And after a few more hard-blinks, he joins in.  But instead of a laugh coming out of his mouth, it is a long red cry.

Scene 15

Boot Lips

I am watching the baby blue woman watch television with awe-filled eyes, and many walm people are watching from behind me.  Probably never seen a television show before.  All of them are enthralled within six-year-old news reruns.  I’m surprised they still have shows on, surprised they didn’t shut it all down completely, the whole damned entertainment market.  Surely they will soon, and it won’t bother me much.  I haven’t seen Battlestar Galactica in days and don’t seem to care.  I’ve already seen them all, but that never stopped me before.

The blue woman is on the floor instead of on a milk crate, comfortable with the cold hardness on her butt flesh, or maybe she didn’t want waffle prints on her skin.  I haven’t given her a name yet.  I don’t think I’m going to get around to it either.  Blue women don’t need names.  They don’t seem to own enough individuality to have them.

           Richard Stein said that names are inconsequential within a race of
perfect
people.  If they all look reasonably alike, if they wear the same clothes, and have the same style, speak the same, maybe they even think the same.  If individuality is wiped out then names should be nonexistent, or maybe numbers should replace them - I should call the blue woman
Number
Nine
.  But Richard Stein wasn’t talking about blue women.  He was talking about the nazis.  If the nazis would’ve taken over during WWII, overpowering the world with their Hitler-loving ideals, they would’ve made everyone identical.  They would’ve killed their enemy, which was individuality, which would’ve made for a horrible world, maybe even worse than the one I’m living in now.  Because without individuality, everyone would be as boring as a blank piece of paper.

In other words:  NAZI = FRAMED PIECE OF BLANK PAPER.

But the anti-nazi people had too much soul to let the nazi utopia happen.  Souls were very bright back then and individuality won the day.

The others arrive in time, just before the boredom’s arrival.  I sense cold crisps and meat flakes on their minds as they enter from the queer world.  The cold crispy emotions they emanate were created from thinking too much while within the untamed outside, mad-agitating streets, which has happened to myself times before.  But I’m not sure where the flaky meat emotions came from.  It probably had to do with being around Death for so long, or maybe they’re getting disgusted with Gin’s appearance.  I’m not for sure, it seems like a very uncomfortable emotion to have.

They tell me about their encounter with Death, taking off their outside clothes and getting drinks from a flapboard box they’ve brought with them, and I try to sound surprised by their story, even though I’ve seen the whole thing in the third person.

I say, "You poop-dicks ate without me?  What am I going to do for food?  I’m not going out by myself with my crappy vision."  I say this because I want to go do something.  Eating seems like the logical activity for me.  And I think my whining is funny.

"Take your blue woman with you," Mort says snobbishly.  He doesn’t enjoy the blue woman’s presence either.  Maybe he’s jealous.

"We’ll go with you, Leaf," Nan says for Nan and Gin - Gin completely overrun by the flaky meat emotions.  "I’m kinda getting sick of this place.  These
people
are getting to me."  She looks straight at the walm people in the corner, unashamed of her rude, ugly smirk.

"I’ll go too," Christian sputters, quiet.

Mort gets all rut-pissy.  "Who is going to help me set up the stage and the equipment?  I’m not doing it all by myself like the last show."

Christian sighs. "Vodka will stay and help you."

"No, he won’t," Vodka says.

"You’re all a bunch of twats," Mortician says.

We leave after an hour of drinking small scotch bottles and watching Scooby Dooby Doo – who the blue woman finds extremely fascinating.  She seemed to understand how the news show was brought about, because they were real people.  But she doesn’t seem to have a clue how animation came about.  She doesn’t know about drawings or moving drawings, and she probably thinks they’re
real
creatures from some strange cartoon world on the other side of the universe. 
Captivation
leaks out of her gluey, wet eyes.  Of course, she probably likes Scooby Dooby Doo because she’s only four.

I thought I would’ve been able to leave the blue woman in the warehouse watching the cartoons, but she wouldn’t let me leave without her.  Sleek-gloss in her eyes when I tried to lock her in my room, a look that almost made me cry.  She sometimes seems emotionless,
cold
, but has an ability to push emotions into me.  Love and regret are two of them.  Obviously, she has control over the way I feel.  Maybe I like it that way.

           I didn’t want her coming with us.  I was afraid she would run away or get lost or hurt. 

           Mortician is already on top of the concert preparations.  He wheels around in my vision as a twisting robot worker.  Spitting.  And he doesn’t respond when we tell him goodbye and head back into the cruel streets of Rippington.

           The first thing I notice as I get through the door is the gray blob of sky overhead, storm clouds moving in, vein-puffed and breathing.  I walk and enjoy the cool air and the different colored street people.  The crowd they make is
everywhere
.  Thick with ugly.  But I can enjoy it from the distance.

           I just smile and say, "Nice day for a walk."

Surprisingly, the tower shops are still open.  We go there.  But they’ve changed the place quite a bit since the beginning of the week.  The upper levels now say, "OFF LIMITS," due to the accidental assassination of the female baboon that was living up there, which means that the high area is vulnerable to scorpion fly attacks.  And which means that the burrito stand that was up there no longer exists.  The emotion monitor on the neck of my mind tells me that I
do
feel some sadness from this happening and I pretend that it feels good.  "Sadness is better than
nothing
," I whisper, and try to believe it.

Nan takes me to
Sid’s Apple Barn
,a place that looks like a toilet stall and is located up inside the brain-tangle section of the tower shops.  It’s kind of a hangout for her almost-friends Liz and Toma and Sid, who owns the Apple Barn.  Sid is a good guy, happy all the time; he’s one of the few people I look up to.  A strong-headed man, violent like the color purple.  He goes by the nickname,
Boot Lips
, and if you ask him why that’s his nickname he will make up a new reason just for you.  His favorite one to say is this: "My skinhead friends always wrestle me when I’m drunk and they like to kick me in the face when I’m on the ground, right in the mouth with their combat boots.  The morning after, my lips would get all swollen and purple.  So my friends’d call me Boot Lips and think it was funny."

I’m not sure about a place called
Sid’s Apple Barn
, but I’m no longer dead set on eating good food.  Anything will suffice.

We see Nan, Leaf, and the unnamed blue woman go up to the counter, leaving Gin and Christian to find a table over in the Food Court Seating Area, which used to be called the
Emergency
Food Court Seating Area.  Nobody ever ate or sat there unless the female baboon wasn’t on the rooftop. So with the female baboon permanently gone, the Emergency Food Court Seating Area is just called the Food Court Seating Area.  But it’s very badly arranged with autocar seats and wood planks on piles of broken television sets or other useless appliances found in the streets.

The only good thing about the tower shops now is that there are still security guards that make sure that the walm people don’t crowd the place or turn it into their home.  Which makes it a refreshing place to go.  And they let some of the skinheads hang out, because they’re native Rippingtonians and have the driver’s licenses to prove they are.

Right now, there aren’t many skinheads around, just a small group of them, and one of that group’s members is Sid’s Girlfriend, Aggie, who never liked Nan because she screwed Sid once in ninth grade - long before she met Gin or any of us, and even before she became part of the skinhead crowd.  Nan isn’t considered a skinhead anymore, at least not by other skinheads.  But she still shaves her head and dresses and acts like one.

We go to Sid so Nan’s old friendship with him can rekindle.  Nobody seems to notice that I’m here to order food.  I just swirl the counter in my vision for fun, with the blue woman rubbing my elbow and smelling the dirtiness on my skin.

Aggie, coated with dark red paint and piercings like facial hair, leans against Sid’s counter.  She curl-bobs her eyes at Nan, then coughs and pretends to be a nice person. She feels threatened by Nan, as always, because Aggie was Sid’s second choice - Nan being the first - way back in the day.  Aggie feels even more threatened by my blue woman; Sid can’t help but stare in her direction between sentences.  I don’t blame him.  A naked woman with rare beauty and turquoise skin is hard to resist.

Nan and Sid and even Aggie spray some words back and forth, mostly about Gin, but my mind wanders and I don’t get to listen to them.  I look at Sid’s menu and see that it’s full of apple-based foods with alcohol mixed in.  It sounds strange to me that an ex-gutterpunk would open an apple barn, but Sid thinks he needs the money.  His parents own an apple grove outside of town and he drives there to get bushels of red-yellow apples for his pies and ciders and casseroles all the time.  "It’s the only work I could get," he claims.  And it’s a good business since overpopulation is making food places scarce.  In a couple of months, I bet
all
restaurants and grocery stores will be gone, extinct, and everyone will have to kill themselves and become zombies like Gin so that they won’t need to eat anymore.  Or maybe they’ll all get in line at Satan Burger and sell their soul to oblivion.  If, that is, Satan Burger doesn’t go out of business before then, from losing its suppliers.

I order the apple-vodka cobbler - not sure how Sid got his hands on the vodka - and some fritters.  I pay with some change I found in my second pair of pants, eighty cents away from becoming broke.  Then we go to the table that Gin and Christian picked out.  It’s a stripped pool table with no legs and chairs from the old high school, but there aren’t enough chairs for the blue woman who sits on my feet.  Sid and Aggie come too, with Aggie’s two girlfriends who don’t speak at all and seem to have no soul left, or maybe they’re just goths who find it trendy to act that way.

Nan and Sid continue talking.  Then Sid begins talking about what’s happened to the world around us.  He still has lots of soul, it seems; he’s not hunched over or anything.  It’s funny how he wants to talk about the human situation here.  Most people try to ignore it or don’t have enough lifeforce to mind to it.

"It’s crazy," he says.  "I love it.  It’s
chaos
."

"Anarchy," Aggie says.

Boot Lips doesn’t understand that he is at risk of losing his soul, nor does he know about heaven getting shut off for good.  He never believed in heaven anyway.  Boot Lips is another person who wants to go to Punk Land when he dies, but I don’t think Punk Land really exists.  Maybe my faith isn’t strong enough.  He doesn’t realize that the world is bread festering with mold, nor does he realize that Gin is dead and still walking around, and hisself could soon be like Gin too.

Gin is still stiff with flaky meat emotions.  Scared maybe.  And Breakfast is hidden away in his patched pack, scraping to get out, hungry.

"The world is just as I always wanted it," says Boot Lips.

"Apocalyptic?" Nan utters.

"I like living in craziness and being unstable."  Boot Lips begins picking at a wart.  "Nothing makes sense anymore and I want us to hold on to that.  The world has always been a boring place of order, at least in America, with chaos only in some ghetto areas.  But even the ghetto chaos was boring.  They were all about who’s who; ghetto gangsters were childish and superficial.  They weren’t much different from rich white preppies from the suburb areas who hated anyone different, hated anything that wasn’t part of the
trends
. Even punks were superficial back then, confused about what the definition of
trendy
was.  Now there’s no trends to follow.  Nobody to look up to or down to, besides yourself.  And nothing gets boring here.
  Nothing
."

Right now, I want to tell Boot Lips about how our situation is more serious than he realizes, and how the walm will take his soul, and how he’s damned to this world forever.  But I don’t tell him.  He looks too happy and too excited about the world.  I don’t want to bring him down.

Boot Lips tells us about his band
Slaughter Shoes
. Nan invites him to play at our Listen Day Concert tonight, even though Nan has no business booking bands at our shows. She has a new swimmy personality around Sid and starts to realize that she would rather be with him than Gin.  Normally Gin would’ve cared about Nan’s change of heart.  But now he’s consumed by writhe-suffering today.

A few seconds later, Nan takes Gin aside, around the back of a water store, to tell him how she feels.  I want to follow them, but my God’s Eyes decide to go inside of Boot Lips’ brain instead.  I discover that he doesn’t have any more interest in Nan. He wants to stay with Aggie.

The only thing I hear Nan tell Gin is:  "I don’t want a man with an wormy penis."

I’m sure Nan and Gin will stay friends.  They’ve been close for quite a long time and Boot Lips doesn’t want Nan. But, surprisingly, Gin’s emotions don’t seem to get any lower after Nan’s breakup statement; he’s already hit the craggy undersurface.  The sight of his hand dancing in his food was the breaking point.  It doesn’t really matter what happens to him now, with or without soul.