Satan Burger (7 page)

"Yes, everyone notices my furniture, everyone
loves
the cute little furniture."  A toaster tries to be cute, wagging its cord like a tail.  "I’m sick of them!" he screams at the toaster, shoving it off the desk to thump on the floor.  "They are so damn annoying."

"Well, what are they?" Christian asks.  "How come they’re alive?"

Satan lights up a thin homosexual-styled cigar and smokes it like a penis, rolling it between his fingers to ash.  "They are my demons.  Bet you didn’t expect demons to be furniture, did you?  Well, there are all sorts of demons.  You see, I have the touch of life.  Everything I touch becomes a living thing, like that door and those chairs, and everything else that is not living that my fingers come across.  Then they become my demons, my servants."

Christian puts his hand in Satan’s face.  "Let me see," he says, lifting his sleeve to reveal a digital wristwatch.  "Make this alive."

Satan touches the wristwatch. 

There is a spark of tiny blue light.  Then the digital wristwatch becomes a living creature that eats, sleeps, poops, and maybe even reproduces.  It cannot speak, but it can beep.

"Weird," Christian says, staring at his new pet.  "That’s what I call a talent."

"I call it a curse," Satan says, pausing to take a puff on his cigar.  Next to his cigars are a couple of packs of cigarettes called
Lung Suicide
and
Cancer Pricks
.  Both of them were invented by Satan himself.  "Anyway, I need
people
here.  These demons aren’t working out at all.  I’ve got a television trying to cook hamburgers, a cash register that can’t even speak trying to take orders, and a credenza trying to work the drive-thru.  The only good they do is clean up the place and hold signs."

"Why don’t
you
cook the hamburgers?" Mort asks.

"How the hell can I make hamburgers?" Satan yells.  "Every time I touch a hamburger it turns into a demon.  Same with fries and vegetables and everything else that isn’t alive.  Sure, that’s how
I
eat my food, but I don’t have a choice considering you can’t eat food without touching it."

"What about using a fork?" Christian argues.

"Yeah, yeah."  Satan gets annoyed.  "That’s what everyone says, but every time I touch a fork to eat, the fork becomes alive.  And when I pick up food with it, the fork eats the food before I get a chance to.  It’s pretty frustrating.  Actually, I don’t mind eating live food - it’s all I’ve been eating since the beginning of time.  But customers just won’t stand for eating a live hamburger, you see. They get grossed out and scared, and it’s just not good business to scare away customers with demon food."

"So you need us to manage your store?" Mort asks.

"Yes, completely."  Satan starts a
Cancer Prick
cigarette even though he is not done with the cigar.  "I’ll still be in charge. I just won’t touch the food or do any of the work."

"You never told us what we’d get paid," Mort says.

"I’m getting to that . . ."  Satan smiles.

Lenny’s autotruck pulls into the parking zone outside.

Nan and Gin are in the cab, shivering from the cold and the shock.  Gin is dead.  He can feel his joints getting all stiff, and thinks his skin is shriveling to rot.  Nan takes him out of the autotruck and he stretches his legs.  The muscles have no feeling in them, but they still move.  He cracks his back and broken neck, hearing the cracking sound but not feeling the relief.  Then he cracks his knuckles for the same response.

"Don’t."  Nan grabs his knuckles.  "You’re going to get arthritis."

"Sorry," Gin says.  He doesn’t want to argue.  Being dead has brought him down a little, his emotions now at junebug size.

Many people say that you’ll get arthritis from cracking your knuckles, but this is a lie.  Some people also think that you’ll mess up your back from cracking it.  This is a lie too. Then there are the people that believe that you’ll actually break your neck if you crack it too quickly.  These are the same people who say if you cross your eyes too much they’ll stick, you get warts from touching frogs, bubble gum takes seven years to digest, and you’ll go blind if you masturbate too much.  All of these things were made up by parents who didn’t want their children to do them.

But most of the parents forgot to tell their children that they were lies once the children were grown up.  And the children told their children the same things, thinking they were absolutely true, and the children’s children told their children, and so on. 

Then, for awhile, no one knew what to believe, because parents didn’t know what the right thing to believe was, so the little girls were scared of their stomachs getting all fat with a four-pound wad of gum, and little boys thought they were going to go blind, and everyone says their friend’s cousin’s uncle’s sister-in-law’s son’s girlfriend’s brother is a blind warted cross-eyed mute with arthritis who had to have surgery to get all the gum out of his stomach.

At one point, all the parents got together and made up their minds to go ask "The Professionals" whether these things were true or not.  But a few days before The Professionals could be contacted for questioning, all of the parents developed a new interest in staring at their walls and shrugging.

Gin and Nan head to the stairs; Nan holds him as he walks.  Normally, Gin wouldn’t like to be babied by Nan - she usually thinks he can’t do anything without her help - but this time he doesn’t mind.  She’s being nice and caring, which are two things he never gets out of her.  Maybe this time he really does need her help. 

Lenny stays jerky in his autotruck.  Nan yells at him, "You just gonna stay there or what?"

Lenny peeks his nerdy head out of the window.  "No, I can’t go in.  I can’t handle the smell of corporate death burger.  I’ll just listen to some music.  I got the new
Cauliflower Ass and Bob
tape yesterday."

"Okay, Lenny."  She doesn’t seem to mind leaving him.

I called Lenny’s head
nerdy
, because that’s what Lenny is.  He’s one of those nerdy punks that dress in classic dork clothes with pocket protectors and thick dork-glasses.  Most of the time, a nerdy punk’s glasses aren’t even real, they’re just plain glass or sometimes clear plastic, just to emphasize the nerdy punk style.

In other words: NERD = PUNK.

Nerdy punk is one of the most unusual styles of punk.  It is not a style of music though, just a clothing style.  Hopefully, there will be a super cool nerdy punk band someday, playing all nerdy punk songs, at a nerdy punk music festival with dozens of other nerdy punk bands.  Skinheads will go there too.  And nerdy punk will never sellout since trendy people hate everything and everyone that is nerdy.

Satan tells us this:

"I’m sure you’ve heard about the walm.  It is the door that lets people in from other worlds.  This may seem like magic to you, but it is not.  Magic is easy.  The walm is more on the technical side.  Technology is hard.  What is the one thing you would not sacrifice for anything in the world?"

Our faces give the expression that we took the question as rhetorical.  He realizes this and continues.

"Your
soul
.  Nobody will ever give up their soul.  Really nice Christian people will say they’d give up their
life
for anyone else to live.  They say this because they mean it, and really would give up their life to save someone else, no matter how evil or wretched.  However, they only say this because after they die, God is going to love them and accept them into Heaven with the greatest of honors.  But they would never give up their
souls
for anyone.  They sacrifice themselves so that they’ll go to Heaven.  Would you go to hell or oblivion for someone else?  Would anyone do it?  Your soul is your everything.  Without it, you are nothing.

"Think about this: would a Christian still follow all the Christian rules and standards if he discovered for an absolute fact that God and Heaven do not exist?"

"Maybe," Christian says, backing the people that call themselves his name.

"Well, you’ll see pretty soon who will and who won’t.  Because, as of now, God has turned His back on the world, and nobody else is going to Heaven - no Christian, no human.  Everyone either stays here or goes to oblivion.  There’s no paradise where the world’s headed.  No hell either."

"What are you getting at?" Mort asks.

"What I’m getting at," Satan says, "is that souls are leaving people’s bodies all over the world.  They are getting sucked out of the left nostril of every human being.  Every night, every day, all day long.  Haven’t you noticed?  The whole world is emotionless.  Nobody cares about anything anymore.  It’s all because they’ve lost their souls.  And it all has to do with the
walm
.  You’ve heard about sillygo, right?  Sillygo is created from human souls.  Souls are what empower that stupid door so that it will stay open and bring in new people and new animals.  In just a month or so, not a single person in the world will have a soul because of that thing.  Which puts me out of business.  I am a soul collector.  My job is to own souls.  Without human souls, I’ll be out of business.  Without my business, I’ll no longer be the devil.  If I’m not the devil, I’ll be human, and then I’ll lose my own soul to sillygo.

"That’s why I opened Satan Burger.  I sell hamburgers that are
so
good that people will trade their souls for them.  And, with those souls, I’ll
always
keep going, and sillygo will never catch me."

Christian asks, "Yeah, but how are you going to get souls from people if sillygo has taken them already."

"That’s the beautiful part," Satan says.  "The walm will always provide me with new souls.  I’ll be in business as long as the walm is in business.  And if the walm goes out of business I’ll be fine, because I won’t have to worry about sillygo stealing my soul after that."

"I don’t believe you," Christian says.  "If this is true, how come it didn’t affect us?"

"You are young.  Young people usually have more spirit in them.  That’s why you’d be perfect working here.  I won’t pay you in money, but I’ll pay you in souls.  As long as you work here, you’ll still have soul.  And soul is the most valuable possession you can ever have. No matter who you are."

ACT TWO

Rising Action

Scene 7

Problems With a Hand

Inside of Satan Burger:

Gin is not taking to being dead.  He’s not been dead for twenty minutes and already he’s going moldy.  His skin is all white now, all of the blood cells under his skin have suffocated and died, and his muscles and joints losing flexibility.  His mind is getting iron-muzzy and weak, like it wants to rest in peace after death, inside some cozy grave.  It doesn’t want to live on and on until forever, because forever is a long and boring period to spend in one place.  His thoughts go claustrophobic inside the skull, wishing to burst out, leave his corpse and go to Punk Land or some place like it, where bodies do not live.  But he’s trapped, always-already trapped. 

A VCR asks for their order.  Of course, a VCR can’t speak, so it makes rewinding and fast-forwarding sounds to communicate.  Gin and Nan don’t understand, so they do not order.  Actually, they are getting rather scared.

"Nan is outside," I say.

Everyone gets up to go see her.  The chairs are relieved at our departure, a whistling of sighs, especially the chair that held me weakly.  Nobody asks how I know Nan’s outside, nor do they care.  They just assume I know what I’m talking about and go.

The door doesn’t give us trouble this time; it’s asleep I think.  Doors love their sleep.

We go to see Nan and Gin - hands folded together on  two chairs that secretly molest their butts.

"How’d you get here?" Mort asks Gin.

"Lenny drove," Nan answers for undead Gin.

"Where is that nerdy then?" Mort asks.  "I missed him at the show."

"He’s outside," Nan says. "He refused to come inside on the count of his vegan-straight-edge-in-your-face attitude."

"I’m gonna go be vegan with him," Mort says.

He leaves the conversation and then the restaurant.  A faint odor follows behind, breathing through the flex-kindly door, which was born in the kitchen’s refrigerator.

Satan slups on his queer grin.

Then he aims this grin at Gin and Nan, striking them with happy-laced words, a motion that he has practiced for days: "Welcome to Satan Burger."

Nowhere and oblivion were completely different things/places to Richard Stein.  For him, oblivion is when something goes into nothing and nowhere is the place where something can come out of nothing.

Out of nowhere, I cry: "Don’t order, Nan."

And there is silence and eyes.

Richard Stein said that some people are allergic to being looked at.  I am one of those people.  I like being considered a shadow for this reason.  If I don’t talk people won’t look at me, and I won’t get an allergy attack - also known as a panic attack.

"What would you like?" Satan asks them.

Christian says, "You’ll lose your soul if you eat this food.  Don’t order."

Slamming fists, mad.  "You’re killing my business," Satan says to Christian.  "Why did I hire you people?"

"She’s a friend of ours," Christian says.  "I’m not gonna just let you take our friends’ souls."

Nan doesn’t understand.  She shrugs and makes a smacking noise with her lips, tough guy trying to be cute again.

Christian takes her aside and discusses the situation, and I watch a table mounting a peanut.  She doesn’t like him pushing her about, even if it is important, so she elbows his hand away.  He tells her Satan’s story and she tells him about Gin’s condition, and they both feel the serious weight of the situation weakening their shoulders to the ground.  Apparently, Gin is living proof of what has happened to the world.  And even without feeling his beatless heart, Christian can tell Gin is dead.  He looks like a zombie, or more like a vampire - like Vod.  Now they believe Satan’s story is
Truth
.  Nobody is going to Heaven and nobody is going to Hell.  Our boring life is eternal.

Then Christian introduces them to Satan.

Satan shakes Nan’s hand.  "Hello, Nan."

And he shakes Gin’s hand.  "Hello, Gin.  You are another of my landlords."

However, Satan doesn’t realize that in shaking Gin’s hand a blue light quietly sparks, turning it into a living creature that eats, breathes, thinks, poops, and sleeps.  Neither Gin nor Satan realize what they’ve done, and I don’t feel up to telling them.

Mort comes back alone.

"Lenny’s not there," he says.

"What?  He just disappeared?" asks Christian.

"I don’t know," Mort says.  "I saw his truck, but Lenny’s not there."

Nan mumbles this: "Where’d that faggot go?"

She does not realize that Satan is a homosexual, and was very offended by that remark.  He already hates her.  Satan usually hates
all
girls anyway.  They always steal men from him.

"He was out in the parking zone?" Satan asks.

Nan looks to him.  "Yeah, why?"

"The Silence," Satan says.

Nobody questions him.

"The Silence took your friend."

Nobody says
What’s the Silence?

Satan Says, "It is a creature that came out of the walm.  Large as a lake, this creature, but it’s not made of water.  It is made of sound.  And it feeds off of sound, or anything that makes sound, or anything that can hear sound.  It will empty this entire world of sound if we let it.  It claims this side of town its territory.  Anybody that’s out on the street is at risk.  It will eat anything that it hears and your friend must have been something it heard.  He will never come back.  Nobody ever escapes from the stomach of Silence."

Satan is wrong about that last statement.  I have been to the stomach of Silence, and I have escaped.  (Then again, I consider myself
nobody
.)

We decide to eat some sandwiches, which is my favorite style of food.  We wanted to eat Satan Burgers, but Satan tells us that it is impossible.  If we eat Satan Burgers our souls will fall out of our bodies and the walm will chop them up and turn them into sillygo to make itself go.  So sandwiches are fine. 

The sandwich is one of the most important foods ever invented.  Named after John Montagu, 4
^th
Earl of Sandwich, who also had a pet bulldog named Sandwich.  The bulldog had a silver collar that said "Bulldog of Sandwich."

The sandwich was invented all by accident.  Someone dropped a food tray at John Montagu’s birthday party, which was on a fun-Sunday.  The food tray had small pieces of bread, pieces of cheese, and pieces of meat. 

Then Sandwich, John Montagu’s bulldog, ate all three of them at once.  And some woman cried, "What a disgusting bulldog.  It ate bread, meat, and cheese all at the same time.  Bulldogs don’t have any manners at all, do they?"  Bulldog just sat there and farted. 

And from that day on, Bulldog of Sandwich would not stand for eating anything less than meat and cheese on two pieces of bread.

John Montagu told his bulldog that nobody liked his disgusting eating habits, and that he should eat the meat, cheese, and bread all separately, but Bulldog of Sandwich would not give in to the immature ideals of high society.  So he went on eating his food in his own way, and later went on to market this style of food to the public.  He called it
the
sandwich
.

"How dare you name a disgusting food creation after me?" said the Earl of Sandwich.

"How dare you name me after a disgusting creation like yourself?" said the Bulldog of Sandwich.

Then John Montagu became so angry with his bulldog that he killed him and ate him between two slices of bread just to prove how disgusting a sandwich was.  Surprisingly, when John Montagu finished eating his bulldog, he said, "My Sandwich was a genius," but by now, the genius was already digesting in his master’s stomach.

When Gin tries to eat, he notices that one of his hands doesn’t work right.  He looks down to see if it is still there, and it is.  But it’s moving like a frantic spider, crawling up his side and attacking his other hand.

"WHAT THE HELL HAS HAPPENED TO MY HAND?" Gin screams, crashing backwards to the floor-sickness, sandwich scatters everywhere.

We all look.

The hand is rummage-running all over the floor, slipping in the sandwich mustard and mayonnaise, trying to detach itself from Gin’s body.  Gin’s shock takes control of him and his body flop-jerks crazy.  His dreadlocks get covered in sandwich, and his hand eats a piece of tomato and onion.          

"What’s wrong with him?" Satan yells.  "Is he spazzy or something?"

Nan grabs hold of Gin and tightens him in place, trying to stop his hand from eating his sandwich.  "It’s alive," Nan says.

"What?" Christian screams, examining with wire-eyes.

They think about it for two seconds.

"Satan," Christian yells.  "What the hell were you thinking?"

"I didn’t do anything," Satan replies.  "Just because everything I touch comes alive doesn’t mean I have anything to do with his hand.  I’ve touched all sorts of people in all sorts of places, but their parts never come alive like that.  I make inanimate things animate, not animate things animate."

Nan starts crying for Gin again.  This just isn’t his day.  First, he gets killed.  Then he turns into a zombie.  Now his hand is a separate-minded creature that is eating his only sandwich. 

"Yeah, but Gin is dead," Christian argues.  "He’s one giant inanimate object."

"Well," Satan says, "how come his hand turned alive instead of his whole body?  Wouldn’t my touch just resurrect him?"

"How should I know?" Christian yells.  "I don’t know anything about dead people.  Shouldn’t you know?  You’re the Lord of the Dead."

"I’m not the Lord of the Dead," Satan disputes.  "I’m the Lord of Darkness.  The Darkness and the Dead are two completely different things.  I know more about life than death."

"Well, you know more about death than I do," Christian says.  "You’ve probably met all sorts of dead people in your line of work."

"Yes," Satan says, "but my job is to damn them to hell, not drink tea with them and discuss what their lives are like now that they’re dead."

"Whatever," Christian says, and a salt shaker agrees by hopping up and down splashing salt all over the counter.

Nan calms Gin eventually.  She tells him that it’s not all that bad.  Someday the hand will learn how to be a hand again.  He’ll just have to adjust, and he’s got all of eternity to do that, even if his soul gets sucked away.

She says, "Life is funny that way."

Gin names his hand
Breakfast.
  It’s the first word that poops into his brain.  That’s the way Gin names everything. He doesn’t care if it is a bad name.  Names are just names, he says.  His dog was named Cancer.  His car was named Forward.  His goldfish were named Socks, Aluminum, Bookshelf, and Paper Cut.  The first choice for everything is always the right one.  That’s what he says about buying things, that’s how he answered test questions in school, that’s how he watches television.

His father was like that too.  "First choice is best," his father would say.  The father was drinking gin when Gin was born.  He was drinking vodka when Vodka was born.  They also had an older sister, who moved to Colorado and married a man twice her age.  Gin’s father was drinking whiskey when she was born.  If he outlives any of his children, Gin’s father plans on drinking a fifth of the appropriate liquor in honor of his lost child, right on the grave, mourning drunk, alone with the corpse.  Of course, that will never happen now.

Breakfast is back to normal color again, unlike the rest of Gin’s flesh.  Eventually, Gin’s entire self will be rotten, white and shriveled and crusty.  His eyes might roll into the back of his head.  All the skin might peel away.  Maybe he will become a living skeleton that can’t do anything but sit there.  Only the hand will be fresh. 

Gin ties his hand up for the time being, and puts it behind his back to keep it from his mind.  He’s still agitated by the whole situation, feeling worse about his hand being alive than the fact that he is dead.  Nan gives him her sandwich, even though he doesn’t need to eat anymore, and he eats in silence.

Satan’s sandwich is alive and screaming as he eats it. If I had emotion enough to cry for the poor thing, I would.  It never had a chance.  The sandwich’s guts - pickles, tomatoes, and onions - squeeze-spray all over the counter.  Then it bleeds mustard and mayonnaise until it goes into shock and faints.

Gin feeds Breakfast some of his sandwich.  Its mouth is where Gin’s lifeline used to be.  The mouth is thin and it doesn’t contain any teeth yet.  Its stomach and lungs have formed beneath the skin of the palm.  The digestion track ends at the base of the wrist, where the sandwich will exit once the time comes.  The hand doesn’t have any eyes, but uses its fingers like antennas which have an extremely keen sense of touch.

Breakfast picks apart the sandwich, using its feelers and mouth.  It doesn’t like the bread.  Hands mostly like meat and onions.  Boiled onions in beef gravy is a very popular meal for hands.

After eating is over with, the room goes tired.

The long night has hit everyone really hard.  Mortician is asleep on a bench, which is also asleep, his pirate hat rests on his head. Earlier in the night, Satan had touched the pirate hat.  Satan doesn’t think before he makes things alive, and it’s quite normal for him to have
all
objects surrounding him alive.  But it’s not normal for him to use caution around inanimate objects, so inanimate objects who don’t want to be animate must learn to avoid his touch.  Now the pirate hat is alive and sleeping on Mort’s head.

Satan’s hobby is creating new demons.  Sometimes he will get some modeling clay and sculpt a large monster with horns and wings and sharp teeth.  Its appearance is meant to be
scary
.  Once he touches them, they turn into demons and spend most of their time scaring people.  This is how humans believed demons looked, but they were mistaken.  Only few demons were made in this style.  All of them are dead now.  The majority of demons are pieces of furniture or doors or tools.

The demons in Satan Burger are all sleeping on their backs, or stirring quietly in the kitchen.  The draining feeling of an endless night seeping into a stale morning has gotten into us all.  Even the furniture-demons need rest.