Satan Burger (9 page)

I do not follow her once she’s gone.

Christian snaps me out of my God’s eyes.

"Where were you?" Christian asks me.

"Over there," pointing thirty feet away.

"What were you doing?"

"I think I saw a blue woman."

"Really?"

"Yeah.  It’s the first time I’ve seen one."

Cecil butts into the conversation. "Don’t ever go near them blue women.  They’re trouble."

"How are they trouble?" I ask him, almost offended.  The blue woman was
soo
perfect
.  There could never be anything troublesome about them.

Cecil says, "The blue women live all around this area, but you don’t see them too often.  They’re all lesbians.  Don’t ever trust a lesbian.  They’re a race that doesn’t have a male species.  The women impregnate each other through organs on their faces.  Their children are born through the alimentary canal instead of the vagina."

"So what’s wrong with them?" Christian asks.

"They’re lesbians.  That’s all," Cecil says.  "Lesbians aren’t any good. There’s no war or fighting without any men.  It’s a terrible-terrible race."

"So they don’t have sex with men?" Christian asks.

"Well . . ." Cecil says, "supposedly, blue women still have intercourse with males of other species, but only for tension release or recreation or something.  Males have nothing to do with the reproduction of blue women, so they don’t marry men.  They’re a bunch of sluts and got all kinds of diseases.  Don’t touch them.  They’re no good at all.  Pure evil, I call them."

Both Christian and Leaf diagree with Cecil.  I am definitely still intrigued by blue women.  I can tell by Christian’s slimy face that he is too. 

As we leave the fried cake stand: mud rocks on my bare feet, more and more people joining the festival crowd, my eyes giving me a small dizzy spell from the drizzling sludge, and Cecil gives us some fried cakes with strawberry sauce.

Then, walking away with a wooden bowl and wooden spoon, Cecil with his mug of beer asks us this:

"Where are you headed?"

We keep walking.  The new rain seems to be issuing from the ground and sprinkling on the sky and clouds.  Like all of the underground was so filled with water that it had to rain it out, into the atmosphere.

Christian turns around to Cecil, and answers him this:

"To oblivion."

The act of eating cakes persuades us to catch a place for sitting, so we choose the insides of the tent arena.  Most of the seats are soaked from the ground rain, a strong wet-forest odor.  The crowd is seated with no complaint to the rain or the tent manufacturers or their wet butts, waiting in anticipation for the first of fifty fights that will journey nonstop into late this night. 

We don’t bother with searching for any dry seats.  The water instantly soaks through my pants to my butt skin, shocking cold, but I let it go.  Dark pools will probably be imprinted on my butt all night at work, unless I find my other pair of pants.

The first fight is between a medieval one and a krellian.

A krellian is a very tall, very strong, very thin creature/person.  It looks like a giant stick man made of rubbery pale skin.  They’re an uncommon breed that were invented by other men - created to be the strongest and fastest fighters of all time, which means this fight will be a short one.  A medieval one cannot defeat a krellian, even when cheating.

In that world, the men were being overrun by zombies -which were called fortics - and didn’t want to be bothered with defending themselves, since there were more important things to be done than worrying about getting killed and eaten.  So they made the powerful race of the krellians to protect their cities from obvious destruction.

The krellians live for hundreds of years, usually all by themselves, and never completely out of danger.  When they’re not killing zombies, they spend their time meditating and practicing religion.   Their god is called Crawn. Crawn is the second god of nine in our system. Yahweh, I believe, is the seventh.  This particular god has more influence on his followers than most gods in his clique.  He gives them powers, even magical powers, to enable them to be muscular and masterful, the greatest race of all for intelligence and efficacy.

Yahweh used to be the opposite of Crawn.  He believed in spiritual strength and love.  He wanted his people to be powerful in the heart - physical and mental strength meant nothing to Him.  But now He has turned his back on our spirits, so I don’t want to talk about His good aspects.

Sometimes I wonder if He didn’t have a choice. 

Maybe He closed the pearly gates so that the walm couldn’t vacuum away all of the souls that He collected.  Maybe He was afraid that His own soul would be taken away and turned into sillygo.  Maybe He cries for the ones he left behind.  Maybe He feels guilty.

Or - maybe His soul is already gone.

And that great rotting corpse up in the sky that was once our God, is staring at his great holy wall, shrugging his great holy shoulders.

With his great holy spirit vanished to oblivion.

The fight starts.

Neither of them do anything, staring statues, glacial.  The krellian is unusually large, even for a krellian.  Intense features.  The crowd seems cheer-happy, excited, impressed by the dominating appearance of the krellian versus a very scared opponent, but I get bored.  Neither of them move.

A krellian will not strike until his opponent strikes first, that is the moral thing to do if you’re krellian, and his opponent is too frightened to attack him.

In boredom, I ask Christian about what he said to Cecil as we were leaving the fried cake stand. "What did you mean?  To
oblivion
."

Christian thinks back.

He remembers.  "Yeah, that’s where we’re headed."

"Do you really think so?" I say.

"That’s what Satan said, didn’t he?"

The medieval one runs to the back of the krellian, but does not attack, still scared.  The krellian doesn’t even turn around; he’s quick enough to turn and defend once his opponent’s sword is swung.

"Can you
really
believe Satan?" I ask him.

"There’s no reason for him to lie about this," Christian says.  "He has nothing to gain."

"Maybe Satan just wants to have us work for free," I say.

"I’d rather take the chance," Christian says.

I nod.

"Satan’s not that bad of a guy," Christian says.  "He’s just a homosexual."

           I pause for a minute, finishing up my fried cake.

The fighting medieval one’s name is Sanders Sword Sunblanket, or S.S.S., also a friend of Cecil’s and is considered one of the better swordsmen here.  Much better than Cecil.  However, he thinks very highly of himself, BIG ego here, so BIG that he thought he could beat a krellian.  Seeing a krellian now, he doesn’t think the same way.

           "So you think we’re going to oblivion?" I ask.

           Sanders runs around to the krellian’s front.  Then he goes behind him again.  Then to the front.  Circling the stickman - motionless man, does not move, like a mantis, waiting for the man to strike, waiting to make its own strike.

           "Of course," Christian says, his eyes not leaving the fight for a second.  "Unless the walm is destroyed, it will get us eventually.  There’s only so many souls we can steal before our own souls are stolen, only so much.  We’ll prolong the inevitable, and that’s okay.  But someday, probably soon, we’re going to be emotionless, just like our parents."

           "You don’t seem too worried."

           "It doesn’t matter," he says.  "I’d rather keep my soul, but if it happens, it happens."

           "But your soul is the most important part of you.  Satan’s right about that.  Without it, you’re absolutely
nothing
, a zombie, a flesh machine.  And oblivion is the worst place you can ever go.  Everything you ever did will be forgotten.  You’ll have no future, no present, no past, no consciousness, nothing."

            "It’s still not that important," Christian says.  "Going into nothingness isn’t something you should worry about.  If anything, it should be a worry-reliever.  Your struggles, uneasiness, fears, bad times are all uplifted, erased.  It’s the only true peace.  It is like sleep without dreams, forever."

           I argue with Christian because I choose to fight oblivion as Satan does.  Oblivion is the only enemy I have and I will not let it win.  I think there is still hope for my soul.  Maybe the walm will go away in time, or maybe I will be working with Satan forever.  Either way, I will never give up, and never go into oblivion.

           Sanders thinks about attacking.  This thought is such a strong thought that it reaches the krellian’s mind, and the krellian
thinks
that Sanders is
really
trying to attack him.  So he swings around and clubs the man in his forehead.  Sanders completely startled by the stickman moving.  And he is more startled by the movement than by his skull being broken indoors, and the blood tickling down his cheek and neck.

           "Well, why don’t you go there now?" I ask him.  "Without a past or present in your future, why live your life at all?  Everything you’re doing here is going to be for nothing."

           "On your way to oblivion," he says, "always take the scenic route."

           Christian smiles, watching the medieval one’s body as it is hauled away, trailing some roasty hot red, and a chunk of hard white . . .

Scene 9

The Trouble With Music

Rippington is facing an overpopulation crisis today.  Word got out through the walm about the festival of war, which most races have heard is the greatest and most violent entertainment in the universe, and hundreds upon hundreds of people are piling into this (my) city every hour.  And Satan speculates that all of these beings will take up permanent residence in this (my) world and so will not be returning through the walm.

I’m not positive how overpopulation is going to affect Rippington.  There might not be enough food and water to support so many people; everyone is going to suffer.  But I’m only afraid for my own suffering, selfish thing that I am, especially because I’m afraid of being inside of a large crowd.  I am not normally claustrophobic.  Being inside of a closet or a tiny room or a coffin doesn’t scare me, but inside of a crowded room or a crowded party puts me into a tornado-like panic.  I’m not good with people other than my friends.  People that go near me make me uncomfortable; they steal my air before I get a chance to breathe it.

This overpopulation is good for business though.  All of Satan Burger is filled with beings on their way to the festival of war, getting some food for the long-long walk across town.  And everybody has a soul to sell for a deep-fried grease-filled Satan Burger.  I always have to explain to the customers what a Satan Burger is.  I tell them, "It’s deep-fried in animal fat, which makes it crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside.  And remember, they’re only two for the price of one."

It is twilight now, but the outside still looks like morning.

I am working the register while Mort and Christian cook.  All of us have to where a uniform of red shirts with red hats, and the hats have tiny red horns on the top, to make us seem more satanic.

The line is very dragging and I am the only person managing it.  The register is rolling in my rolling vision, making it hard to find the right keys, swirl-whirling off the counter.  I hear many complaints in many different languages - complaints that I’m not moving fast enough I’m sure.  I go out of my body and into the line to see how I look: I am like a confused old man, hitting only one register key each minute, drugged up in a daze.  I find it funny that everyone is so impatient to lose their souls.

Since nobody pays in money, you’d figure there would be no reason for a register – that’s what I was thinking yesterday and why I agreed to work the counter.  But the register is used as a typewriter that writes down each customer’s order, and prints it up for the customer to sign.  The signature is an approval for Satan to take the soul away from the customer after the soul leaves the body.

The customers are willing to trade their immortal souls for food.  True, it’s the best tasting food ever created - so they say - but I wouldn’t trade my soul for anything.  They do not know, however, know that they are to lose their souls immediately.  Most of them think that they will go to hell
after
they die, which they don’t think is bad because dying doesn’t exist here anymore.  But that’s not the way it works.  Satan Burgers are so good that they make your soul lighter than air, and it floats out of your body and flies around the room. 

Right now, Satan is chasing souls around the dining area, scooping them up with butterfly nets, placing them inside of a little tupperware container that says, in BIG black magic marker letters:  H E L L

When a soul leaves a being, the being’s consciousness doesn’t completely leave with the soul, some of it stays with the corpse.  The consciousness is made up of memories, thoughts, and emotions.  After the soul leaves, the body keeps a little bit from each of these things.  It gets the
soul
resin
- the only energy that the majority of people have inside of them now.  You can go on living with soul resin, but it won’t be any fun.  The only real point to living when you’re in the soul resin state is to keep on living.

           Before, when there were still gates open in heaven, when people were allowed to die, dead corpses would have soul resin still inside of them, left behind.  Sure this resin would be useless, because the body doesn’t move anymore, but it could still be sensed by certain individuals that were born with the ability to sense creatures from the afterlife dimension.

Now that people can’t die, there are all kinds of undead beings drifting about, just like Gin.  They are only undead because they still have their life-force.  If something like the walm takes away their souls, they will no longer be undead.  Their soul will go to oblivion and their zombie body will only have soul resin.  And when a zombie has nothing but resin for a soul, it thinks: "The only real point to living is to keep on living. But since my corpse has no life to keep on living, I must go to my grave and fall into a deep, dark sleep."

Sometimes, when you scream really-really loud, you can awaken the sleeping dead.  This is the worst possible thing you can do to it.  If a woken corpse is notably cranky, it might try to eat your brain to stop you from screaming.  If you continue to scream after your brain has been eaten, the corpse will eat more of you until it is absolutely certain that you will not be capable of molesting its slumber anymore.  This is how the brain-eating zombie stereotype originated.

Nighttime now, but it still looks like morning outside.

Satan has been playing some music on the stereo system.  He calls it
Satan Music
, because he recorded the songs himself.  It isn’t like anything I’ve heard before.  Seems more like noise than music, but it is much different than the electronic noise that my band plays.  Describing it is extremely difficult.  Definitely something to be heard rather than heard about.

Basically, it is described as this: put every sound in the universe into one instrument and play a half-melodic tune, with a female vocalist who is being tortured and sexually gratified at the same time; also, throw twelve thousand stones at a single target without rhythm.  The music is very intense and very loud, and gives you a feeling quite similar to the flu.

Before I met Satan, I knew of a certain type of heavy metal that was called
Satan Music
.  This kind of Satan music was created in the eighties to make bands such as Iron Maiden and Dokken look like wimps.  One of the first Satan music bands was called Venom.  All the Venom fans would dress in black clothes and dye their hair black and let their faces go pale from lack of sun.  This was all an attempt to look scary and vampiric, kind of like Vod.

In other words:  VENOM = EVIL.

The music is very intriguing at first, but then it gets annoying after an hour and you just want to get away from it.  I keep trying to get Satan to turn the music down, but Satan doesn’t ever listen.

I try sarcasm and say, "Satan, can you turn the music any louder?"

And he says, "No, that’s as loud as it gets."

So I continue with nonstop soul-buying for another hour.

Eventually, business slows and the line thins.  Then, all of a sudden, it’s all gone.  No more orders.  Only ten people left in the store, eating their food and losing their souls.

I exit my post and sit into a booth with a hot cup of orange-nut coffee, creamy blend.  The music forces my temples to tighten up solid, vibrating my upper spine. 

And then an explosion: "SATAN, TURN THE FUCKING MUSIC DOWN!!!" 

A yell.

For the first time in years, I yelled.  You could barely hear it over the music, but I yelled.

Satan agrees with my nodding head by nodding his head.  He turns it down to a nice background score and says, "You’re right.  Silence is in the parking zone again.  It might hear us."

"How do you know?" Christian asks, stepping out of the kitchen with one Newport cigarette on his tongue.

"No more customers," Satan responds, lowering his Satan Music a touch more.  "Silence either swallowed them up or scared them into the distance."

"Why do you keep playing that music?" I ask Satan.

I drink down half my coffee and go to refill it.  The tangy brown fluid whirls from the cup onto the floor.

"Music attracts customers," Satan says.

"
Good
music attracts customers," I say.

The last of the customers leave, the cigarette machine opens the door for them, to be eaten by the Silence.

           "But I
do
play good music," Satan argues, almost offended.  "I wrote it."

           "It’s not good," I say.  "You’re music scares people.  Especially me.  The only thing it’s good for is making me sick."

           "Do you really think so?" Satan says, understanding voice.  "This is the kind of music I’ve always found most appealing."

           "Actually," Christian butts in, "I’ve heard some people say that they came here
because
of the music.  They heard it from half a mile away, and they came to see what it was.  They seemed really interested in it, until their souls fell out.  Personally, I think the music’s unusual enough to be interesting.  I think it actually does attract people."

           "Well, it makes me sick," I say to Christian.

           "Really?" Christian sits across from me.  "I actually like it."

           Satan is happy with his music and turns it louder again.  Not
too
loud, I can handle it at this volume for now.  As he passes me on his way to the office, he flicks my shirt like a little kid, the red Satan Burger shirt, and the shirt becomes a demon, squiggling on my chest.  It doesn’t seem to bother me.

           I just notice that I’ve been a part of the past conversation.  Normally, I don’t speak that much.  And I
never
get into arguments or yell or complain like I just did.  Also, the shirt that is now alive and squiggling on my torso usually would have put me in suffering, irritatingly squeamish.

           Maybe I’m drunk right now, even though I don’t remember drinking anything. When I’m drunk, I say things without thinking.  Drinking numbs you from your ability to reason.  It makes you forget your own character and become a crazy.  Maybe I am a crazy now; I’m going through so much chaos these days that reality is hard to grasp.

           Or maybe all the sillygo, floating around in my oxygen, is making me go silly. 

"Well, Gin’s not doing too good," Christian says to me.

           "What’s wrong?" I ask.  "Still upset about his hand?"

           "Not just his hand.  Early today, when they were working, Satan accidentally touched him a few times, made more of Gin’s body parts alive.  If this keeps up, Gin’s going to have nothing left that he can control besides his brain."

I use my God’s Eyes to go see Gin.

He looks the opposite of well, sitting on his bed with Nan, trying to fall asleep, Nan brushing his hair away and holding him, like a concerned lover, something she’s never been to him before.  Maybe she’s getting soft.

Breakfast is attacking Gin’s neck, trying to shake him up, but he ignores the hand.  Gin’s eyes dribble back into his head, with some white on exhibition for the draft to parch.  The room is lit by one candle, which is a symbol for Gin.  He’s the type of person that romanticizes candlelit lifestyles, like the people before the electricity days, nights by the fire in the living room and just a candle for the bedroom.  He says that candles make the world a droning softness, a falling whisper.

Gin’s new flesh-pets are asleep.  They’re more upsetting to him than the hand, because they are more numerous.  Now he feels his whole being has basically come to an end.  It is just a vehicle for other creatures to live.  One of them is his left shoulder, who he named Encyclopedia, another is his little finger, who he named Battery, and his right butt cheek, who he named Selenson.  Selenson means
Son of the Moon
.  Nan created this name for Gin; she says it’s never been used before.

Satan also patted Gin on the head, and made eight of his dreads alive.  At this point, Gin wasn’t in the mood for naming any more body parts, so he calls them Medusa Hairs.

Richard Stein mentioned the Medusa to me.  He said that she was a little woman in Houston, who could turn a little man into her slave, making him work his little butt all day long, just for her, just so she could take his money and buy herself things.  This happened every time they stared deep into each other’s eyes.  What the man saw was
love
, what the Medusa saw was
money
.  After the man stopped earning enough money, the Medusa divorced him, leaving him broke and empty.  Richard Stein said that his first wife was this Medusa, and she had snakes for hair.

Gin’s dreads are snakes now too, worming around in the candle flame, in the forehead of a dozen naked beings.  I zoom my vision to see what the naked beings are doing inside of the candle’s flame.

They are a group of Firemites, beings made of energy, living in fire.  They originally came from the surface of the sun, where thousands upon thousands of them live, swirling around in the BIG hot.  Without fire, Firemites turn into one-dimensional shadow creatures that eventually die if they don’t find fire again, just as we would die without food.  This is not a problem for Firemites on their home world, but it is to the ones that are in this candle now.  Their sizes change with the size of the fire, a candle will make them tiny, a bonfire will make them man-sized.  It may just be a rumor, but the Firemites are supposed to have highly intelligent societies on the sun, that we cannot understand.  They don’t seem to be very intelligent to me right there in the flame.  They seem rather primitive, moronic.

They gaze as a giant orgy of flames, rolling over each other, exchanging energy-like kisses, large fire cocks penetrating fire vaginas.  The only thing that matters to firemites seems to be food and sex, which might be why they are considered so intelligent.

Gin and Nan fall into blissful sleep - the best thing in life - with Gin’s living body part pets, the dreadlocks wave-snaking inside the air, hissing like Medusa, and the family of Firemites are sweating in their orgy of food and sex, hoping the candle doesn’t burn out anytime soon.