Satan Burger (8 page)

Gin, Nan, and Vodka have left for home.  They used a teleportation device - a satanic device - to travel back to the warehouse.  The device looks similar to a piece of candy corn.  When you touch the yellow butt, a door shoots out of the white tip.  And you can go anywhere you want through that door, if you program it right.  Satan has programmed the door so that all of us can get between the warehouse and the restaurant with no trouble or time wasted.

Vodka found the teleporting door very interesting, but nobody else seemed to care.  Doors are doors, no matter how unusual or magical they might seem.  Everyone else said, "That’s a very convenient door," but nothing else.  The door looks even more bizarre than the candy corn remote for it.  It’s made of energy, orange colors that swirl all around, which is why Vod likes it.  He’s into bizarre-looking things.  He’s a bizarre-looking thing himself.

Gin, Nan, and Vodka went to sleep.  Their shift is in the morning and they’ll have to work all day collecting souls from unsuspecting customers.  Mort, Christian, and I have the later shift, so it’s not necessary for us to go to sleep right away.  My body is getting awfully tired, though, so I let it sleep.  But my vision stays awake, soaring into the air above, hovering over Satan and Christian.  Neither one of them have tired.  Christian doesn’t wear down easily, going for days at a time without sleep.  He has started on another bottle of gold liqueur, soon to be gritty-mad drunk.  This brand is called
Gold Rush
, the second best brand you can buy.  Fool’s Gold is piss compared to Gold Rush.

           Christian and Satan are drinking and smoking with each other’s company.  Satan is drinking a beer from a living bottle - the bottle’s beer is its blood, so Satan is bleeding it to death - but the bottle can’t complain. Satan is its master, after all.

           Satan gets to talking about where he came from.  First, he first mentions his father, Yahweh, who is God.

           Yahweh’s main job is to create things.  It is the job that all gods are paid to do.  There is a god inside every living star.  Within our sun, there is Yahweh.  He is not in our dimension, however.  If God was in our dimension, the sun’s fire stomach would burn Him up.

           Inside of the god dimension, a sun looks like a shopping mall, where the temperature is always perfect, and there are plenty of benches to sit on near fountains and plants.  Some people call this shopping mall
Heaven
.

           Inside of the shopping mall, God creates all of his creations. 

           The first thing Mr. Yahweh ever created was a small table.  It was not a very good table.  The legs were not evenly cut and it wobbles when you touch it.  Near the center of the shopping mall, you can still go and see it on display.  It’s a good example of how nobody is perfect, not even God.

           Satan was the first intricate structure Yahweh ever made.  Satan was the first angel.  An angel is the same as a human, only it’s born in the dimension where gods live.  They also get special powers.  Some angels have the power to fly.  Others can see in the dark, or read minds, or run really fast.  Satan has the touch of life.  Satan was God’s favorite.

           Gods live very frustrating lives.  That’s why they are so frustrating to get along with.  And they are
bitter
for living such a long-long time with no end, and being responsible for billions upon billions of life forms is a very demanding job.  Gods are the fathers of their worlds, but Yahweh seems more like the drunken abusive father that wears a wife-beater T-shirt, who doesn’t like his home dirty when he comes back from work.

           When Satan came out of the closet, he was sent to hell.  Hell was just a giant prison located at the center of the Earth, within the god dimension.  Of course, it was the most pain-drudgy prison ever built.  All of the evil souls of history lived there, and Satan was the prison guard who monitored the evil.  Yahweh labeled him the most evil person in hell, because he was the first homosexual.  And God considers homosexuality the most disgusting evil of them all.

           Satan is glad Hell doesn’t exist anymore.  It was a shitty job, and he didn’t need it.  The walm ate all of the souls from hell before it started eating the ones on Earth, so all the tyrants of history that you’ve known are in oblivion now.  Only your memory of them exists.  Satan saved some of the souls, though, because he is a collector of souls.  Hitler is one.  Kublai Khan is another.  Aristotle is another.

           Richard Stein said that God is very picky about the souls He lets into heaven.  He won’t even let you in if you haven’t been baptized.  And people like Aristotle are the ones that really got screwed, since the art of baptism didn’t even exist in their lifetimes. Aristotle was a good man, but he was born too early in history and had to go to hell. 

           Richard Stein hated God for making up that rule.  Actually, he just hated the Christians for it.  He never met God.  Why should he care about somebody he never met?

Scene 8

The Festival of War

Awake around noon, I tremble my corpse throughout the warehouse, feet sticking to the concrete floor, grits of sand cleaving, devoted to my feet.  Going without shoes makes your feet go tough and leathery, but they become susceptible to picking up rocks and bits.  A piece of broken glass can never cut you when stepped on, but it will stick to your heel and walk with you for days.

           Nobody else is encircling yet.  Three of them are at work and the other two are sleeping.  My hair is stiff-scrabbled from the hard rest.  The head my body owns is heavy, pulling my neck muscles to work.  The neck bone is cramped up.  A good sharp pain would relax it, massage it. The jab of a knife might do the trick.

I find a knife near the band equipment, one that Mort uses for screwing.

           Stabbing my neck’s back with the sharp of the knife, I sit on the toilet in the center of the room.  As I poop, I put the television on my lap and watch adventure cartoons on the network for cartoons.  Johnny Quest is on right now, Thunder Cats is coming up next.  As I stab my neck, making the neck tissue loose, and Johnny Quest rides his speedboat in the amazon, rolling in my rolling world . . .

I notice a man through the window. 

At first, I don’t mind him.  He’s only passing on the carpet walkway.  Then he passes again, and then another again.  I continue pinching out the waste-food, trying to pinch faster, hoping that the man outside does not see me sitting here with my pants down and a TV on my lap.

            Another man clankers by. He’s in a suit of armor, doing some kind of construction work.

I use my God’s eyes to investigate.

A large tent picks itself up in my yard.  The tent is made of gray wire lizard tissue - used in underground societies for clothing and other textiles, societies which are widely known as
dark
ones
.  Black tendons hold the tent sturdy, flags swim from the ropes on small poles, cages and cages of murk below the tent’s arena filter a smoldering fatty smell.  The workers continue right by my window, annoying us (their neighbors) with a festival, just as we annoyed them with our electronic noise performance last night. Payback.

The landscape is early dark from the smothering rain clouds and a drizzle of pollution.  Everyone seems a mess: sludgy clothes, grains of soil and weed milk that dreads their hairs together, and the skin cut by rocks becomes infected with crispy diseases from grooming the caged walm beasts.

I don’t see any dark ones, only the medieval tent villagers.  The dark ones are a race that came from a diseased world.  They lived under the planet’s surface with the giant beetles and reptiles that became their food and materials – clothing, beds, bone-weapons.  Nobody in Rippington communicates with them except for our neighbors, the medieval ones, who are their friends because they are both very violent cultures.  Every so often, the medieval ones and the dark ones will have a battle for entertainment, for the whole world to see, and they call it
The Festival of War
.

The dark ones are probably not out yet: still too bright outside.  Dark ones are sensitive to the sun and can only wander during the night moments.  They have pale features: white skin, white hair, and white eyes, with a hint of green to their nails and blood vessels.  They look a lot like humans, but have cold blood.  Some say they evolved from lizards rather than apes.  I heard about the dark ones from Christian, who heard about them from our neighbors.

The dark females are known for their unusual sexual behavior.  They are the dirtiest, most violent, most revolting, sex-crazed creatures to ever come through the walm.  Christian says they are more reptilian than the male species: without any hair growing on their bodies, sharp claw-like fingernails, cold beady eyes, and snake tongues that are up to ten inches wide and eighteen inches long.  Their sex drives are intense.  They can’t be sexually calmed without being gratified at least six times a day.  It gets so laborious at times that the males are forced to lock their females away, to keep themselves from injury.

A dark one’s sexual performance starts with the female injecting her enormous snake-muscle tongue within her partner’s rectum.  This arouses the male’s penis, which is situated on his chest between the nipples.  She can also carve simple designs into his backside to help him bleed.  This is foreplay for dark ones.  Once the tongue is disengaged, the female squats into the male’s erect penis.

As the struggle progresses, the female drives her claws deep into her opponent’s flesh, rip-cutting with the magic moment.  She will begin licking the blood or eating the pieces of meat she has taken, or she will plunge her tongue into the male’s throat and suffocate him.  Suffocation is sexually exciting to dark males.  And the male will give the female extra pleasure by dishing out fist-blows to the sensitive portions of her skin.  The females may look more reptilian than the males, but their skin is gentle and smooth, so the males don’t cut the feminine flesh as the females cut into them.  They do, however, pound bruises into their milky scales.

After the males first started locking away the more sexually active females, they smiled their big teethy mouths a lot, very happy to be relieved of their sex duties.  However, the females found imprisonment very frustrating and resorted to lesbianism.

I’ve heard of four other new races that are fierce in sexual activity.  They include: the aphid clan on the north side, the fire mites, the blue women, and the cockroach people.  I’ve never seen any of these races, but I’ve heard many stories from Christian.

I finish with the toilet and step outside.

All the medieval ones are at labor on their festival.  It looks like it will start tonight, hopefully before I have to work.  Some of our other neighbors, the midgets in presidential costume, are watching the creation of this festival.  There’s a James K. Polk midget, a Benjamin Harrison midget, a Woodrow Wilson midget, a John Quincy Adams midget, and an injured Abraham Lincoln midget.  It seems that all of the community, every cultural group in the neighborhood, is excited about the festival, and I’m sure to see them all tonight.  There are so many interesting peoples I have never seen before, and I can’t wait to meet them all.

Lenny told Nan that
he
was the last anthropologist, but now that he’s dead I guess I will take that title for myself.  And since I’ve given up the reading of history books, other than Richard Stein’s, I will make experiencing new walm races my hobby.  I will try to write them all down, into a book - my history book.  The walm might be able to take my soul away and throw me into oblivion, but my life and the memory of all of these races will live on through my writing.  There should be at least something of me to live on after I die.  Oblivion only wins when you are forgotten.

Once I hear Christian awake, I reenter the warehouse.

Christian, with his flashy pants and buttoning up his white shirt, wrinkled clothes and hair, goes to the steaming toilet for his morning piss.

Christian has a few cuts in his face.  They’re from sleeping with broken glass.  He doesn’t know how it happens, but every morning he finds shards of glass under his sheets. Nobody puts them there.  There’s not much glass in the warehouse at all except for broken beer bottles here and there.  He just rolls around in his bed, getting all cut up, bloody sometimes.  This time the glass got his face, it must’ve been sleeping on his pillow.

Normally, the glass only gets his back.  He’s got extensive scars, like train tracks, like stretch marks on his love handles.  My only guess is that the glass hates the cold concrete floor, and at night the shards snuggle into bed with Christian to nuzzle against his warm hips and fat.

Christian notices the festival through the window.  "What’s going on?"  He goes to check it out before I answer.

"Big, big, big," he says.

Many more cultures are out here now.  I see a family of the aphid people.

The aphids are standing with refreshments from the refreshment stand, so apparently some festival booths are open.  There are four adults and eight children, watching the caged animals growl and sleep.  The medieval ones don’t mind the spectators, working away at the tents and stages.  One warrior says, "Looks like we’ll definitely have a crowd tonight."  The other warriors practice for their fight in the arena.  I call them warriors instead of gladiators - though it is the same type of bout - because gladiators are slaves that fight other slaves for amusement, and these warriors are freemen that fight other freemen for fun.

The aphids are a peculiar ant-like people.  Their male/female ratio is one to three, because of their sexual performances.  The males have three sexual organs on three places of their bodies.  All of the sexual organs look a lot like tennis shoes; one is on his stomach, and two are on each of the hands.  When the aphid people mate, three women fuck one man, one woman for each sex organ.  They are also joined in marriage in fours.  One husband and three wives.  Each of the wives have assigned jobs: One is in charge of child care, one is in charge of home maintenance, and one assists the father with putting food on the table.  These families usually produce twelve to sixteen children and are prejudice against other aphid families.  As a result, incestuous behavior is very common, sometimes encouraged.

The aphid family jolly-walks away from Christian’s vision.  The husband of the family goes first; and his wife - the second father and also his sister - is in the back to make sure the children don’t wander.  The children all hold hands, crab-claw hands.

"Let’s go check it out," Christian says, stepping out the door.

I follow him barefooted.  He already has his shoes on; he didn’t take them off last night.

We stroll, watching . . . I waddle with rolling visions of water wheels and windmill turnings being constructed outside of the BIG tent.  My shaggy nest of hair, greasy and dry and dready, lonely for shampoo, butterflies in the wet wind.

Medieval ones break apart pieces of wood, shredding them to make the floor for the inside tent.  Loud hammering sounds, like metal rain falling around us. We drift closer to the tent village.  Most of the spectators are here, watching all the construction, eager for tonight’s events.

Christian recognizes a man coming out of a festival tent.  It is Cecil Sword Dodd, an older drunk about thirty-five, the only medieval one we know.  He doesn’t have a family and drinks with anyone willing, even an outsider.  Drinking is what Christian has in common with him, which is why they consider each other
drinking buddies
.

Cecil’s middle name is
Sword
.  All male medieval ones are supposed to have a weapon for their middle name.  Common middle names are: Dagger, Arrow, Club, Sickle, Hammer, Trident, and Hatchet.  The middle name you have is the weapon you specialize in.  Middle names are required and enforced so that nobody gets confused about which medieval one is good at using which weapon.  At first, I thought it was strange, but then I got to know the medieval ones.  Their lives revolve around weapons and fighting, even when they don’t have any enemies to fight.

When Christian met Cecil, Cecil called him over from the train tracks.  He offered him a drink and so they drank.  Then, when they introduced themselves, Cecil wanted to know Christian’s middle name.  Cecil said this: "So what’s your weapon?"

"Huh?" Christian then said.

"Your middle name."

"James," Christian said.

"That’s an odd name for a weapon," Cecil said.  "What’s it look like?"

"It’s not a weapon.  It’s a biblical figure."

That’s when Cecil told Christian how middle names are weapons.  And Christian told Cecil what biblical figures were.

Christian then told him his new middle name: "Broken Beer Bottle."

"Cecil," Christian yawps.

           We head over to the tent.  Cecil looks up from his cake-making.  He’s the fried cake-maker, and he runs the booth himself.  The only customer he’s had is an Andrew Jackson midget, who has already purchased a fried cake and is now glazing it with raspberry topping.

           "My friend, Christian," Cecil says in a toothless smile, alcohol breath.  "Are you coming to the fights tonight?"

           "I don’t think so," Christian answers.  "I have to work."

           "You’re going to miss a lot.  I’m fighting a Carpet Beast."

           "What’s a Carpet Beast?"

           "It’s like a small bear, but it has carpet instead of fur, and walks like an ape."

           "Sounds tough.  I wish I could see it."

           "There’s going to be fights all day long, including one with a Prowler Beast.  You should at least watch the first match. It should start pretty soon."

I stop paying attention to Christian and Cecil and use my God’s eyes to go after a naked woman that’s passing in the distance.

She is naked, but nobody minds.

She’s walking, free from the rest of the world it seems, hidden inside of her mind, smiling like a four-year-old.  Thin and perfect.  Yes, she is absolute perfection.  She’s like a machine.  Only a machine could be perfectly beautiful, so artistic and unnatural.  To me she’s the most breath-filching creature I’ve seen. Nobody else seems to notice her, even though she doesn’t have any clothes on.

No sound comes out of her walk.

Only a machine can be flowingly silent.

She must be a blue woman, because she has light blue skin and deep red hair, a fire crotch too, and green-blue eyes that are sharp like turquoise.  Her eyes are the largest feature on her face.  BIG and innocent.

I bring my vision around close to her face and take a look into those eyes and fall still.  One look.  I feel weak, small, possessed maybe.  Her eyes are so BIG that I get my soul sucked out, drawn into her.  She could take my life away in a breath, and I would allow her to, let her inhale me inside of her, just so I could be
inside
of her.  And that is all I want to do, with the last of my life - to be inside of her.  Forever-forever.