Satan Burger (6 page)

"You’re all crazy."

I go back to the front of the gas station, afraid that it has disappeared.  But it’s still there and so is the Gremlin autocar.  Mort, Vod, and Christian are back, smoking cigarettes on the pavement, drinking some fresh-bought Creamed Corn Pale Ale.

When they ask me where I’ve been, I say, "Taking a piss."

When I ask them where they’ve been, they say, "Smoking a bowl."

The air is still silent as ever, and the surroundings are as dark as before, but I feel safe enough to realize that the old crazies in Humphrey’s Pub really were just old crazies.  We get back into the autocar and head for Satan Burger, drinking beers and singing
All For Mr. Grog
.

Back at the gas station, Mort asked, "Why is everything dead here?"

Back at the gas station, Christian answered, "Because it’s 3:00 in the morning, guy.  Nothing stays awake this late anymore."

"Except Satan," I said, back at the gas station.

Nan and Lenny are driving in the silence too.  There’s no sound coming from the wind.  It should be hitting them through the open windows right now.  No sound from the outside at all.  Like everywhere else, the road is empty-dark.  There are streetlights all down the road, but none of them have turned on.  Even the lights don’t care about anything anymore.  They stare at Lenny’s autotruck and shrug.

"Have you been to the walm?" Lenny asks Nan.

"No, have you?"  Nan seems to care less.

"I went with Stag the other day.  It’s weird as hell.  There are somethings going in and somethings coming out – mostly coming out.  It’s guarded by these fish people with wings and large brains.  We also saw this creature that had a blank face: no physical features or any hair.  Stag called it a
Dance
, a heavenly creature whose only purpose in life is to dance across eternity.  He said he read about them in mythology class."

I’ve heard of the Dances as well.  They are ignorant (innocent) beings similar to humans, but have no mouths or ears or eyes or noses.  The only sense they have is
feeling
, so the only thing they can do is dance and screw each other, trying to produce as many Dances as they can populate.  Usually, they
over
populate to drive their race as far from extinction as possible, since it is not very hard for a blind and deaf mute to go to its death.

We call them
Dances
because they appear to
dance
in the sun on the mountains - blind, deaf, and mute - but they are not really dancing.  They are eating sunlight.  The dancing motions are similar to the motions our arms make when eating sausage with a fork and a knife; the only difference is they’re eating solar energy.  And when the sunlight gets digested and goes through the tubing to the exit, it is dumped as a shadow.  In fact, thirty-four percent of the world’s shadows are now produced from Dance droppings.  Some Arizona businessman used to harvest the energy waste and sell it for BIG profit during the blistering hot Arizona summers.  He called his product
Shade in a Can
.

"Sounds boring," Nan says about the walm.

"No, it’s great.  You should go there sometime."

"Lenny, I’d bash my face into a brick first.  Why the hell would I care to go see a bunch of disgusting walm people?  You’re the only person I know who enjoys learning about other cultures."

"I’m the last anthropologist, you can say."

"I never cared there was a first one," she says.

Lenny’s autotruck goes up the scorpion fly hill and down to the scene of an accident, which is shrouded in
silence
.  No one has arrived before them.

"Is that Stag’s car?" Lenny asks, knowing the answer.

They park next to the wounded autocar.  The thing’s been torn in half by an aluminum tree which is now leaning out of its roots.  Pieces of engine have been sewn into the soils for nature to grow them into new autocars.

Nan darts out of the truck, asking a tree, "Where is Gin?" but the tree is still unconscious.  She doesn’t bother to ask the jogger that is strapped to the roof, because it is very obvious that he is dead.

Lenny finds Stag on the other side of the autocar covered in black loam and tree sap, with his skull broken indoors and all the blood dried to a film on the outside of his body.

"Stag’s dead," Lenny says.

Stag is not dead, as I told you before.  He is unconscious without a heartbeat.

But we can’t blame Lenny for thinking this, because it is a very common misunderstanding to take a sleeping someone who has no heartbeat for a dead someone.  Doctors, coroners, morticians, even grave-diggers all make the same mistake on a daily basis.  If you haven’t got a heartbeat, I suggest that you don’t sleep so much because eventually someone will think you are dead and either cremate you or bury you.  And I assure you, waking up to find out that you’ve been cremated or buried is no way to start your day.  I especially stress that you don’t sleep in the middle of the street, floating in the swimming pool, hanging from a noose, curled up in a bathtub with a toaster, holding an empty cup of liquid plumber, or lying on the kitchen floor with a knife stuck in your back.

In addition to the missing heartbeat, Stag doesn’t breathe, feel (other than his left eye), or need to eat.  He’s a zombie.

Richard Stein said that a zombie is the star of a very low budget horror movie that can’t be killed and hates to come out during the day. Its favorite pastimes include the mindlessly gnawing of human brains with a group of companion zombies, moaning really loud, and taking very-very slow nature walks by the graveyard.  But Stag is not the same as Richard Stein’s zombie.  He’s just a dead person that is still alive.  He’s not mindless and doesn’t care much for eating human brain.

Nan finds Gin rickety-smoking a cigarette on a nearby pile of granite, trying to straighten out his broken neck.  She hears his neck snip-crack a bit, getting a better position; he sighs with relief.  The sigh was queer to him, not a normal sigh of relief that comes naturally after fixing a problem.  It was a
forced
sigh.  This is because he doesn’t breathe anymore.  He can
force
himself to breathe if he wants to, but he doesn’t need to in order to survive.  For Gin, breathing is completely voluntary now. He can go weeks without taking a breath and without even realizing that he hasn’t taken a breath.

Nan squats next to him on a cardboard log and asks, "What happened?"

"I was killed," he answers.

"What - how could you be killed?"

"Stag and I got in a car accident and died."

She laughs.  "What are you?  A zombie?"

"Yes."  He puts her hand on his heart.  "No heartbeat," he says.

Ripping her hand back, she shivers a laugh.  It is
funny
to her.

"You’re cold," her voice giggling-drunk.

"Not completely," he says, serious.

"Does that make me a necrophiliac?"

"Stop."

His hippie-sorrow eyes drool into her, and she feels his hurting. 
Please-please
, she senses him say.  Nan holds him.  All he can hear is her awkwardness.

Lenny arrives to repeat, "Stag’s dead," purple-wide face, stutters.

Gin answers, "Yeah, so am I."

"How can you be dead if you’re walking around?" Lenny asks.

"I don’t know.  I’ve never been dead before."

"Stag isn’t walking around," Lenny says.

Gin says, "Maybe he is asleep."

"No, he’s dead.  His skull is broken."

They go back to the autocar to find Stag.

"I’ll show you," Zombie Gin says . . . But Stag isn’t there once they arrive.

"He
was
here," Lenny says, adjusting his nerdy-wear glasses.

"Are you sure he was, Lenny?" Nan asks, holding onto Gin to warm his blood.

"Of course I am," answers Lenny.  "What did he do?  Just get up and walk away with a collapsed skull?"

"Yes," Gin says coldly, scratching his left eye.

I go to my body. 

A handwritten sign says, "Satan Burger, 2 miles."

"It’s a pretty long drive for food," Mort comments.

I look through the windows at the moon.  It isn’t our
original
moon.  We lost the original moon in ’72.  Well,
we
didn’t lose it.  The moon lost itself.  It forgot its way around the Earth, probably because of its Alzheimer’s or maybe it was committing suicide to save itself from the oblivion that Alzheimer’s would cause.  It strayed from its usual path, breaking from its orbit, sinking into infinite soot, through millions of tiny white dots - pinholes in black construction paper held up to a light.  And we never heard from it again. 

Now we have a new moon.

We had to build it ourselves out of concrete.  It wasn’t an easy job.  Making colossal molds, miles and miles high – a pain in the ass.  It was a titanic ball of white, larger than mountains, but not as BIG as the original.  To solve the size difference, it had to be launched into a new orbit, placed closer to the Earth, so that it would appear to be the same size as the original.

Sometimes I look at pictures of the old moon.  There’s not too many differences, except that the sponsors who paid for the new moon insisted on putting their logos all over the surface.  But it’s better to have a corporate moon than none at all.

The world was miserable without its moon: that’s what my ex-father told me.  He said the night skies were empty-dark.  So dark that more streetlights had to be made and people owned a dozen flashlights each.

Back then, romance seemed foolish without a moonlit night; not that anyone cares for romance anymore, but I heard it was a BIG thing back then.  And the astronauts that went to the original moon felt really stupid for wasting their time on a sphere that no longer exists.

They thought the poetic words, "One giant leap for mankind," should’ve been used somewhere else.

Scene 6

The Queen of Darkness

It is now the period between day and night where the sky is dark blue and silky cold.  Normally, the sky’s condition would not be considered strange, but after three minutes of driving, the sky went from pitch night to almost morning.  Even though it’s only 3 a.m.

I come to the conclusion that this side of town is closer to the sun than our side, so the day here arrives earlier than what I’m used to.

Vodka drives without noticing the sky change.  He is within a small cotton ball cloud, which is his
go-away
place.  A go-away place is the place where your mind goes when it is tired of being on Earth.  Normally, it is a comfortable place where you can sleep and relax and forget all your worries.  Sometimes it’s a fantasy world that is more interesting than real life.  It may not be less laborious, but it is less boring.

It’s not hard getting to your go-away place, but coming back can be hard.  One side effect of not coming back very often is having difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality.  That’s what Richard Stein said.  In his history book, he talks about his cousin, Anne, who was committed to an institution because she couldn’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality.  They called her
insane
.  An institution was once a place where they cared for people like this, but nobody cares enough to care for anyone anymore, so insane people are now in the streets and institutions are places where new people find refuge after coming out of the walm. 

My go-away place is almost impossible to leave.  Luckily, I don’t go there often enough to lose touch with my sanity.  I call it
Sleepyland
.  It’s a place where dozens of naked people are piled together inside a moist fruit cellar, doing nothing but sleeping lustfully on top of each other.  This doesn’t seem like much, but it is complete comfort to me.  Sleepyland is so hard to leave because the fruit cellar chemicals make you feel drugged-drowsy and stiff-shanked, so all you do is sleep and dream, which makes it hard to get back to reality.

To get out of Sleepyland you have to:  first, get woken up by one of the sleeping nudes who inhabit the sleepy land, and second, you have to be taken out of your head by someone in reality before you fall asleep in Sleepyland again.  You can never get out all by yourself.  You need to go there when a friend is nearby who has the ability of waking you; and inside of sleepy land, you should sleep next to someone who snores or rolls around a lot.  Actually, it’s better not to go at all.

We see a BIG sign ahead:

"SATAN BURGER: THE NEW FAMILY RESTAURANTE."

The street is no brighter than before, but now it’s grayed misty.  An early post-rain morning, cold and calm, the whole city asleep.  Well, besides one car and one business.  It’s still around 3:00 a.m. on an
Erdaday
- the eighth day of the week.

They created the eight-day week about ten years ago.  Erdaday was put between Saturday and Sunday, to break up the alliteration, kind of like how Wednesday breaks up Tuesday and Thursday.  Erdaday means Earth Day.  It was invented by TES - The Environmentalist Society - who thought that we were messing the planet up much-much more than we were cleaning it.  So they thought that everyone should clean up Earth for one day out of every week.  It was a BIG hit with the American population, because people would have three-day weekends instead of just two.  Mostly everyone just looked at it as a day off, even though it was meant to have a purpose.  It’s just like how Sabbath Day was meant for church-going, but not too many people went to church.  Most people called Sabbath day
Hangover Day
and instead of going to church they would spend their time drinking a lot of bloody marys stepping over newspapers in their underwear.  Now, there are no more church-goers and there are no more environmentalists, so every weekend day is Hangover Day.

I don’t know why Christians used Sunday as the day of Sabbath and Jews used Saturday (though Saturday is the last day of the week and makes more sense).  I think Christians made Sunday the Sabbath because God and the sun are - more or less - the same entity. 

Christians made Monday the first day of the week. Monday means Moon Day.  Tuesday comes next.  It means War Day, named after Tiw, a god of Germanic mythology.  Wednesday was also named after a god - Woden, the chief god.  Thursday is Thunder Day.  Friday is Love Day, named after Fria, Goddess of Love.  And Saturday is Saturn Day.

A while back, somebody explained that having an eight-day week would be sacrilegious, but these days
one
person can’t make a difference.  Hell, a whole barnyard full of people can’t make a difference.

As we pull into the Satan Burger parking zone at the bottom of a hill, we see a chair holding a sign that reads. "GRAND OPENING," and a ceiling fan that promotes, "TWO SATAN BURGERS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE."

Satan Burger is at the top of the hill - a jagged steep prick with blackened earth and a step-path seven minutes long.  The drive-thru is a lift that pulls your car up the side of the rock face to a pay window.  I can see the lift rocking about way up there, and there’s a menu on it so you can decide what deep-fried burger you want before you reach the top.

We can’t see much from here, so I use my God’s eyes to climb up the steps.  I see that it is a white building with the red letters
S
and
B
established on the rooftop.  It doesn’t seem different than any other fast food chain, aside from the fact that Satan himself is the owner/manager and not to mention the strange vegetation that grows on the top of the hill.

The vegetation looks like a forest of black thorn-weeds, tall as trees, wrinkled and crawling like vines, squirreling and generating small scratchy-twitter sounds.  The plant leaks a red liquid that people are
supposed
to believe is blood, so it appears like an
evil
place.  Maybe they are man-eater trees that came out of the walm, or maybe Satan brought them from hell. We keep away from them, in any case.  No telling what they are capable of.

Richard Stein said that Satan was kicked out of Heaven for being a snob.  He thought he was the best angel up there, because God loved him the best.  And when God decided to love something else (Child Earth) Satan had a hissy fit and called God a
chum-chum,
which was considered an insult back in the days before Man was created. 

Sometimes you’ll hear someone call a friend a
chum
.  Whenever God hears this from Heaven, He starts laughing his ass off at the someone’s friend, who just smiles clueless of the insult.  One thing God does not like to be called is a
c
hum-chum.  Another is an
idiot
.  Another is
wrong
.  Telling God that He is wrong is probably the stupidest thing you can possibly do, because He is
never
wrong, and He’ll make your life wrong and your brain wrong and your face wrong just to make you regret putting the words
God
and
wrong
in the same sentence, unless the sentence is this:
God is never wrong, he knows everything about everything. 

Strangely, however, God finds being called a fuck-o or a fuck-face an amusing performance: after all, these are very fun words to say when you’re angry.  They launch off your tongue like fists.

I go back to my skin to step out of the Gremlin autocar, preparing my wire muscles for a steep hike, rubbing them with needlelike fingers.  I replace some old Gremlin breath with the coldy-crisp air, fresh for the system, wakens me up for the premature morning.  It is still silent out, and the streets are still dead, not a living thing in the vicinity.  It doesn’t bother me right now.  The morning light is comforting.  It is a shame that most people miss this time of day.  Personally, I’d prefer to sleep through twilight than dawn.

Satan Burger is not actually on the top of the hill.  It’s a little closer than halfway.  We get there pretty easily, although irritated by Vodka’s moan for German food instead of corporate death burger. 

Near the door of the restaurant, a box holds a sign up that says, "Help NEEDED!"

Behind the restaurant, there’s a small trail that continues up the steep hill, and near the opening of the trail there’s a table with a sign telling us, "Now approaching scorpion fly zone.  NO female baboons allowed!"

Upon entering Satan Burger, the only customer we notice besides ourselves is a small troll that only speaks ancient druidic languages.  He sits in the corner and minds to himself, drinking a black cup of coffee and reading a collection of surfing anecdotes.

A cigarette machine greets us in the entranceway.  It has two signs: "Come this way" and "Two Newports for the price of one!"

The cigarette machine can’t speak, because it doesn’t own a voice box, but I can tell that it would be complaining if it could.  It doesn’t have any arms either, so there is no way that it wrote the signs all by itself.  Our job is to follow it, maybe decide whether or not the cigarettes are worth buying.

The cigarette machine is our hostess because Satan wants to make it known right off that Satan Burger is a smoking restaurant.  It is divided into two sections: smoking and heavy smoking.  The machine also sells kaffa-bud cigarettes and dippy bob rocks, if you’re into that sort of thing.

We follow the hostess, hobbling all fat-heavy on its tiny legs, toward the front counter, where a cash register winks and waits for our orders.  A crowd of tables and chairs watch us as we travel, staring, shifting, screeching across the tile.  The entire restaurant – it’s empty of all human employees, run entirely by living furniture.

Satan appears behind the counter.

He is shorter than me, looks middle-aged, with a gray beard and brown-gray hair, a queer smile stretches out his face, wearing a dark suit and red tie, and there’s a pin that says
Gay Pride
with a picture of a smiling penis that resembles a cartoon worm going into a butthole.

Mortician sees the pin and hides behind Christian and Vod, whispering, "I told you.  I told you he’s gay."

Mort is what Richard Stein would have called
homophobic
.  It’s a phobia usually caused by one of three things:

1)         Being raised to believe homosexuals are socially unacceptable.

2)         Not coming in contact with any homosexuals during the adolescent period.

3)         Being gay and afraid to accept it.

Not too many people are homophobic anymore.  Nobody cares enough to hate or fear anyone/anything.  The word
faggot
is no longer an insult.  And there are no more active second-wave skinheads or nazis or rednecks to go
faggot-bashing
.  So faggots are safe from oppression.  But they have no interest in going to gay bars and are therefore not actively faggotting, which makes the entire gay and lesbian society a waste of time.

Satan may be the last homosexual on Earth that wears pro-gay pins.

Richard Stein said that fighting for gay rights and parading gay pride are two things that homosexuals publicly enjoyed.  If these two things didn’t exist, there probably wouldn’t be as many gays around, because many people find parades and fighting for rights attractive enough to become gay.  Stein also said that some people become gay just to be different than everyone else.  They don’t want to conform to the sexual preferences that authority has bestowed upon them.

In other words: GAY = ANARCHY.

Satan continues his queer grinning for five minutes.  We watch him, scared to interrupt.

Then Satan goes into question.  "Are you here for food or employment?"

Christian is our speaker.  "Maybe both."

I didn’t think about the
help needed
sign until now.  Christian always talks about getting a job, but he never actually gets one.  I would get a job too, but it’s almost hopeless with my eyes.  We apply for jobs everywhere we can, but never get a response or even an interview.  Mort, whose always been a worker, calls Christian and I lazy assholes for never working, but we don’t seem to care.  Nowadays, the only person you can find in this world is the type that falls into the
lazy asshole
category.

"You’re the young man that rented me a room," Satan finally notices Mort, "aren’t you?"

"Yes," Mort says.  "These are my roommates, Leaf and Christian."

"Christian?" Satan tweaks.  "That’s an offensive name to me."  He’s actually joking when he says this, but nobody takes it as a joke.

"Sorry," Christian apologizes, as if he had something to do with naming himself.

"Don’t worry about it."  Satan waves his hand in a circle.  "You’re all okay by me.  Well, you
are
my landlords.  The jobs are all yours if you want them."

"How much do you pay?" Mort asks, still behind Christian.

"I don’t pay in money," he answers.  "Money isn’t going to last much longer anyway.  Before the end of the year, the governments are going to say that it isn’t worth the effort and discontinue its value.  Dollars will become worthless, and given to the bathrooms for toilet paper.  You’ll see."

"I don’t understand," Christian says.  "You’re talking crazy."

"I don’t speak crazy," Satan argues.  "Come in the back and I’ll explain."

We go through the kitchen to a small office, whose door is angry at us when we open him, waking him up.  He hits Mort - last in line - in the back, knobbing him right between two links of spinal column, as if too impatient to wait for him to get completely inside.

"What’s wrong with your door?" Mort complains.

"It’s stubborn and doesn’t like its job," says Satan.  "Sometimes it won’t open at all."

There are five chairs.  We sit in them.  All but one of them is alive, the one vodka is sitting in, or maybe it’s just asleep.  Mine is either nervous or weak, shifting me from side to back to side, with a wrinkled cushy-plastic seat, making whooshing sounds under my butt.

"How come your door is alive?" Christian asks.