Satan Burger

Scene 1 Acid Ocean Eyes

The world is still new.

It is still developing/mutating like it is sludgeling through its puberty moments, within the tricky awkward stages of physical and emotional development, just finding hair where it did not have hair before. It seems old to us, but it only seems because our lives are so short. Not to mention that time goes faster for planets than it does for us humans. Just how time goes faster for humans compared to small sandwich bugs, which need to live at a slow pace in order to get a good view of the world before their scheduled expire, since the life span of a sandwich bug is only 2.51 days.

To the rest of the universe, Earth is just an adolescent boy, whine-crying around the legs of the aged worlds in the universe. His older brothers and sister — Jupiter and Venus as example — are also considered immature, but compared to Earth they are the top of sophistication, and Child Earth looks up-up to them all day long. Since the elder worlds prefer not to probe into the matters of brat-hooligan planets, the universe doesn’t recognize our solar system on a regular basis.

And our human race has been around for such a brief amount of time that the universe hasn’t had the chance to detect us yet. One blink is all it needs to miss our dance through actuality.

In contrast, there are many other worlds inside and outside our galaxy that are considerably older than ours. They are like hundred-or-so-year-old humans, crippled and drooling all over their selves — drool being the ocean water spilling onto the coast, which is a tidal wave, sometimes called a tsunami — and because of their senility they forget all about the laws of nature and accidentally kill their parasites, which we call living beings. Forgetting to spin on its axle is the most common mistake of a senile planet, which splits the world into endless day and endless night, both of which are life-ending positions.

Another way a world kills its parasites is journeying too close to the sun, from sleep-strolling or mindless-wandering. This gives the world a nice brown suntan — or sunburn, depending on how long it bathes — and in less than a week its crab-red skin flakes and peels away; along with its burnt animals, vegetation, and most of its water supply — revealing a fresh surface to build on.

Earth won’t grow senile enough to do this, at least not in our generation, and not in a thousand to come. It will most likely die long before it goes old, when the sun grows and grows up into a red giant, swallowing the Earth into its fire stomach. Unless Earth figures a way to detach itself from its orbit and find another system to live in, which in turn will destroy living kind anyway.

So God (who called Earth the spoiled brat of his nine planets) gave him the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were Earth’s first toys, fun and BIG and cute for infant games, but they got boring rather quickly, just as stuffed animals get boring to aging human children. They were fun in a physical sense, but they were lacking imagination and the ability to form a society, so Earth wiped them out.

Then God gave Earth a being which was capable of forming a society — which was mankind.

Child Earth putter-played with us, watching us build up civilization and grow and flourish, then every once in awhile he’d wreck us with earthquakes and hurricanes. Though cruel to the human society, Earth found destruction quite amusing. It was much more fun than watching dinosaurs eat each other.

Now the human race isn’t enough. There’s only so much entertainment you can get out of a single brand of toy before it gets boring.

Recently, Earth approached the idea of trade. He wanted to swap his toys with the ones owned by his friend worlds. This idea came to him by watching human children in little schoolyards, who had action figures quite like the ones Earth has. The only difference between human beings and action figures is that action figures come with rocket packs and laser guns.

God was the being that made it possible for Earth to swap action figures. He set up a door called a walm, which gives our Earth access to beings from other worlds, times, and dimensions. Now Earth can pluck any creature from any place in the universe and put them into his personal collection, and he’s been doing it all decade.

So God is keeping Child Earth clear from boredom. But as children always are, boredom only stays away for a little piece of a while.

The walm is located in Rippington, which is now the most populated city in the world. About five years ago, it wasn’t that large at all and was being recognized only as the capital of New Canada. The walm changed all that.

A young man named Leaf was born in this town, before the walm was born. He came into place the same year they re-elected Pat Paulsen for his second term as president of the United States of America, in 1976.

Over-populating Rippington created a difficult lifestyle for the Rippingtonians. A sick-hard struggle. It also made life a jumble-confusing subsistence, with the majority of the population consisting of foreign action figures, who rarely learn to speak the native language, Canadian.

Once the rest of the citizens of the world found out about the walm causing an overpopulation problem, they just stared at their walls and shrugged.

Nobody cared then, nobody cares now, not even the New Canadians care and they are the victims of this situation.

Nobody cares in the least bit about anything anymore. It’s like there is a drug in the air that makes everything seem unimportant, no matter how important anything is. A mother will witness her own child convulse and die, right in her chubby lap, and all she will do is stare at her wall and shrug.

Then she’ll say, “Guess I’ll have to make another one.”

Actually, I am exaggerating. Some people still care, especially the younger people. But most of the population is lame/untrue to their human emotions and nobody has found out exactly why.

I can only think of one man who even tried to uncover this problem’s cause. It was an Alaskan psychologist who called it a disease, but he could not figure out why so many were so numb in the spirit. Even after several years of research, the only thing he came up with was that the world and its population had come into a plain state of endless boredom.

After the fourth year, he put his notes and books down.

And said, “oh well.”

Staring at his wall, shrugging.

The people of Rippington are not quite as bored as the rest of the world for one reason or another. I suspect it’s because of the walm, but I’m not sure. Nor do I care.

Leaf is on the border between emotionful and emotionless. He cares a lot about some things and a little about others. Maybe it’s because some things are boring and some things haven’t bored him yet.

Let me correct myself:

I am Leaf.

I apologize for speaking in the third person when explaining myself, but that’s just how I seem to be. I catch myself doing this quite often. It’s because I can see in the third person. Anywhere in the world I want to go, my eyes will go. They will pop out of their sockets and wander the countryside. Just as a god or a movie camera would go. Even myself is just another character to me, hovering over my body from God’s Eyes, watching someone else moving and talking to my commands, my own living corpse.

I call my body a corpse sometimes. It is because I don’t like it at all. It bores me. I’d much rather live inside a strong man’s body. Then maybe I’d have more self-esteem and I wouldn’t need to look at myself in the third person. My body is all dangle-lanky and weak. It whines when I ask it to move, and the bones creak and complain as they labor.

My last name is no longer in use. I am just plain Leaf. It was Cable in the beginning, if I remember correctly, but Cable is retired now. I am just a Leaf. And I don’t feel that I need to have a last name.

I feel pathetic sometimes, and I think that it is funny.

My parents were Mr. and Mrs. Cable. I don’t care to remember their first names. I’m sure they don’t care to remember mine either. Actually, they better remember my name. They gave this weak-wretched title to me.

They said to me, “Leaf is also a name for a person and not just the vegetation that grows on trees and plants.”

However, they meant Leif. Leif is the person and Leaf is just a leaf.

Great, eh? I’m a leaf, not a human being like my parents once told me.

People always took my parents for hippies for naming me Leaf.

I would respond: “No, take them for idiots.”

I would not capitalize my name if I hadn’t been named Leaf. My personality calls for a spelling in all lowercase letters, like mike or bobby or stephen or joey. Spelling your name like this shows that you feel inferior to the rest of the world, as I certainly do.

But if I were to spell my name leaf, then someone might suspect that I really am the vegetation that grows on trees and plants instead of a person. Maybe even God would believe that. And during autumn, when all the leaves crumple and fall from their branches to die, I too would curl into a crispy ball and drop from the surface of the planet, to suffocate in the breathless areas of the universe.

I’m not very good at talking either. I am utterly confused, sometimes. This is because I took too many drugs when I was in high school. Actually, I wasn’t in high school during this period. I was dropped out. When I say something like “back when I was in high school,” I usually mean: “back when I was supposed to be in high school.”

Anyway, I did a lot of Felix back then, and snoopies and cucumber seeds and slur corn — this was back when I had the money for such high society drugs — I also did a lot of opie, but that was usually free from friends. Nobody really sells Opie thinking there’s a market for the stuff. It’s basically dirt, the chemical version of Groo.

After my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Cable, figured out — it did take them a while to figure anything out — that I replaced doing homework with doing expensive, mind-altering drugs, they decided it would be best for their selves to not have a child anymore.

So I left my parents, off on my own, working at corner shops and thinking they’d miss me. But they didn’t, and to hell with them.

One day, I called up Mrs. Cable (mother) to ask if she missed me. After I asked, there was a long pause. I’m sure she was just staring at her wall, shrugging. So I never called again.

After I was on my own, I resorted to drugs that were easier to come by. Actually, I can’t relate them to real drugs. They were just chemicals, household products that you can buy in any/every store. Air-fresh was the first product I tried. It was invigorating, like taking a bubble bath with your brain. Cough-away was good too, but your vision strobe-battered and made you sick. Later, I experimented/gambled with anything that had toxic ingredients inside. Some things made me gorefully sick. Some things could have killed me.

I hate to think back on those days.

About fifteen months after I left home, I found myself

permanently deranged by these drugs. And I haven’t been cured.

Because of my drugging experiments, I can no longer communicate like the rest of the world can. My mind is locked away from reality somewhere; the thinking is perfect/straight, but my voice doesn’t come out right when I speak my thoughts. I have a stutter, and it takes time for my thoughts to process into words people can understand. Maybe that is my problem, I think in thoughts instead of in words.

I have a bad attention span too.

Speaking eventually became so difficult to me that I gave it up, almost entirely, and I have loads and loads of free time to think now, which I actually enjoy. Who needs a voice anyway? I stay silent during the whiles, usually talking in my head, speaking only to my best good friend and those who are blessed with patience. I do partake in conversations with people, in a way, but my opinions are only expressed to myself, within my brain, and nobody gets to hear them.

I do have friends, plenty of friends. This is an odd thing, now that I think about it, since I’m so antisocial and mind-screwed and all. They think I’m funny for being the way I am, the silent character of the group. Every group has one. I guess. Somebody has to be in the back of the crowd, following. They say I appear and disappear without any of them noticing. Sometimes they say I’m a ghost. Sometimes they say I have magic powers.

Since I don’t speak so much, I write words on my shirts to express myself to the world. I wrote ghost on one of them. Slave on another. The most descriptive shirt says crippled.

Other shirts tell people: I am a sandwich, I am a dildo, and I am the drunk driver that killed your kid — an attempt at being mean.

But my voice is only one thing that the drugs screwed up. The worst part is what happened to my vision. It is all cracked up, kind of like acid-drug. Everything I see is always shifting and melting, like the world is made of water, streaming down and around and up again.

It’s like schizophrenia, I guess, but my thoughts are completely normal. Maybe it’s half schizophrenia; my thoughts are sane, but my vision is insane. Maybe it really is schizophrenia and I just think I am sane. I don’t know. I just know I have to go through this alone.

I call the watery world, Rolling World.

My friends call it, Acid Ocean Eyes.

But — I can see in the third person without everything rolling, thank Yahweh (or whatever God likes to be called), so I don’t miss my old eyes so much.

Sometimes I believe that I’m blessed with my God’s Eyes, just like the people on TV that say they are blessed with psychic powers. God’s sympathy is why I can see this way, even though I have never been a BIG fan of God’s. Someday I’ll figure out why He gave them to me.

Maybe I am His son, like Jesus Christ, but regarded as the fuck-up of his two children. Who knows…

Occasionally I enjoy my rolling world. It can put me into a peaceful hum that relaxes every twitchy nerve in my body. Sure, it’s hard to get around when you can’t see straight, but sometimes it is pacific-beauty.

Once I asked a doctor, “What is wrong with me?”

I figured he wouldn’t believe me. Even I don’t believe me. Who has ever heard of acid ocean eyes?

But the doctor was just staring at his wall, paying no compassion.

Then he shrugged.

He said, “There is always something wrong with someone.”

Scene 2 The Warehouse Between Dimensions

I live in a warehouse with three friends and two strangers.

My highest of the three friends is named Christian. He has a speaking problem caused by drug abuse as well — maybe that’s why we became friends — but it is quite the opposite of mine. His problem is that he never shuts up, like he’s naturally cranked up on snoopies, the dippy-fun guy. He talks and talks and talks, even when there’s nothing to talk about, even when he’s alone. Over and over, the same subjects, annoying mostly everyone he comes into contact with. Most of the time all his talking gets on my nerves as well, but I’m sure that all my silence is a pester to him.

But it isn’t like that all the time. When I’m alone with him, we communicate differently than with a crowd. I speak more and he speaks less, so that it all evens out to a medium speed somehow. Besides the small people in my wall, he is the only person that I enjoy talking to.

Nobody knows that Christian and I speak differently when we are alone. They say that Leaf is as silent as a leaf, and Christian is as obnoxious as a Christian.

I don’t remember Christians being obnoxious, but my friends tell me they all were at one point. So they say. There are no more Christians today, at least not the Christ-worshipping kind, and there aren’t any religions either.

The religions were the first things that everyone became bored with. People stopped praying and going to church, holy water went unblessed, crosses and candles were no longer being purchased. The whole religious phenomenon just vanished, like snap, besides the few who considered their religion’s ways of living too routine to stop.

Routine is an important word today, because it is the only thing left that makes the world go around.

The people of Rippington are excluded from this statement, since the walm is the opposite of routine. And the walm brings out odd feelings in the beings that surround it. These feelings are the natural reaction to the foreign energy that fuels the walm, the stuff that makes it go. We call the energy sillygo, but that’s not the scientific term. The name the scientists gave it was the stuff that makes it go, because the scientists didn’t care much to give it a proper scientific name.

We call it sillygo because it makes you go silly. Nobody knows any more about it than that. Probably because everyone in Rippington went silly, and I’m sure everyone outside of Rippington could care less.

As for the people that come out of the walm, they could give a pig’s twat about the native Rippingtonians. They are Earth’s new toys, and the only things Child Earth pays attention to these days are the new toys. No longer does he enjoy watching the lives of us outdated action figures as he did with my ancestors. New toys are now higher classed citizens as far as Earth is concerned, even if the old toys have more money and better living arrangements.

The new people live on the streets in small settlements. Two settlements are nearby the warehouse where I live. One is a medieval tent village by the train tracks. The other is a colony of midgets that dress up like past U.S. presidents. (The word midget, by the way, is no longer an offensive term since no one is offended by anything anymore.)

I think I’ve seen an Ulysses S. Grant midget once, but I’m not for sure. Grant was the closest president that popped into my head at that time, so I guessed it was him. How many were fat and bearded anyway? Most of the midgets are not very good at impersonating. Maybe they like it that way.

I am sitting in the warehouse with my cello right now.

It’s not a very healthy cello. I found it in an abandoned apartment house all crippled and warped. But I’m not a very good cello player, so it all evens out. I like to make scratch-crazy noises on it, defacing it with the bow. I’m very good at this. Getting more and more obnoxious every day. And I am very proud of myself.

The cello is also the soundtrack to my rolling world vision. Right now, I’m scratching at the strings, creating a sound similar to a saw cutting wood, ogling at a group of steel sculptures, very sharp-spiked and crude, and they roll around like lardy belly dancers.

The warehouse was once used for producing hundreds of steel sculptures by a female artist known as The Lady of Steel. The works are awe-interesting in my roll-woggy eyes, but none of my roommates appreciate them, spitting candy-phlegm on the ground sometimes. The outside world has probably lost all interest in art by now. Not even the citizens of Rippington care for it. Not even my friends.

After The Lady of Steel lost all her money, she gave us her warehouse and all of her sculptures. She said she was going to go through the walm to find a less boring place to live in, one with an appreciation for fine art. She was the only person I can think of who wanted to go through that horrible walm door, into another dimension-world.

I look down at my forearm:

The arm hairs are fanning without wind, crawling like creeper-weeds, wire-spiders, pulsating soup skin.

I look to the window: a malformed wave of water, coming to crash over me, the drool of a senile planet. My stomach turns with the wave. My breath vibrating. I can no longer keep up with the rolling world, so my eyes close drunk.

Whenever my visions get me dizzy from an overdose of movement, I either shut myself off from the outside world or look through my God’s Eyes. I’ve chosen the latter.

God’s Eyes:

I go to my best friend, Mr. Christian, looking down at him through the cloud’s chin-hair, as he walks up the train track carrying a steel drum. Christian is wearing a polyester suit; he always wears a polyester suit. We call him a wannabe rude boy, smoking on his cheap cigars. There aren’t any more rude boys. There aren’t any more wannabe rude boys either. The term I am speaking of is a Jamaican slang word for gangster.

In the sixties, Jamaicans would pretend to be rude boys. They would dress up classy in zoot suits, porkpie hats, cold eyebrows, smooth words. They were influenced by ska music, which often glorified the lifestyles of rude boys and made everyone want to be one. Years later, the same thing happened with rap music. Glorifying gangsters (sometimes spelled/pronounced gangstas ) in music usually creates wannabes.

Christian does not consider himself a rude boy, and he doesn’t care for the jazz-like music that rude boys listened to. He considers himself punk and wears his suits just to be unusual.

In other words: UNUSUAL = PUNK.

Two medieval knights are sword-fighting in Christian’s path, going clink-clink and arr-arr! He doesn’t mind to them, passing by with hardly a flinch when their swords collide. We are accustomed to walking through battles in our front rail yard. It is so common that we don’t care enough to use our dodging skills anymore — too lazy. Charging right through is the quickest way.

Nobody is afraid of dying these days either.

“Death isn’t as bad as everyone thinks,” Christian always says. “It’s just one step away from being alive again.”

He’s believed in reincarnation ever since he was a child. He swears that his little sister was reincarnated into his pet ferret five years after her death. Then his pet ferret was reincarnated into a wolf spider, and then an autocar, and then a rock. It’s always an animal or object, never another person that can say hi, I’m a reincarnation of his sister, so he’s hard to argue against. Nobody believes him, but he’ll punch your face off your head if you tell him he’s wrong.

Somebody said that Christian was responsible for his sister’s death, leaving her all alone in the kitchen when he was supposed to be watching her. But it was probably his parents’ fault or, more likely, God’s fault.

When Christian arrives at the warehouse and trips over my corpse, only half a thumb of a cigar left, he yells out my name and I awake inside of my rolling world.

His face melts out twitchy-fast words: “Figured your punk ass’d be here, always locked away, never doing anything anymore, you look like a pile of dick.”

He’s right about one thing. I’m always indoors. Everyone calls me agoraphobic, but you’d be too if you had eyes like mine. I pause, continuing with the wood-sawing sounds, staring at the sculpture-dancers.

I respond, “You’d be too if you had eyes like mine.” It’s my usual response.

Christian goes to the toilet in the center of the room. We use this toilet for crapping and as a television stand since it is situated in the middle of a room instead of a bathroom. He has to take the television off the seat before he tinkers into the tinker pot.

“You’re always bummed about that shit, guy,” he spurts. “Get on with your life. If I could trip all day without needing any drugs, I’d be cumming in my pants.”

He always says that.

And I always say this:

“You get stressed of it quick.” I scratch my shirt that says Brain Disease.

“Yeah, yeah, always complaining.” Christian grumbles the toilet water down. “Complaining, complaining, whining, complaining.”

“What’s wrong with you?” I say in a shaky, tiny-girl voice.

“The usual,” he responds, placing the television back on the toilet seat. “Overwhelmed with boredom.”

He turns the channels on the TV, most of which seem to be cooking shows and game shows.

“I think Battlestar Galactica’s going to be on soon,” I say grubulous.

Christian complies with a squint and corrects the channel, pulling up a milk crate. I hate sitting on milk crates, but they’re our only chairs.

I continue, “If I had to choose only one show to watch forever… it’d be Battlestar Galactica.”

I go into my God’s Eyes and wander the room, move around to the back of the television set and watch us as we watch television.

Behind Christian and my corpse, I see a bald, fat, middle-aged man staring at us through the window, puckering his lips, making perverted expressions.

“I thought you only liked the theme song, guy,” Christian says. “Nobody seriously likes that stupid show.”

I am actually offended by this, but nobody shows offense anymore so I don’t make a BIG deal out of it.

“No, I seriously like it.” The words leave my brain and come out of my corpse in the distance, almost like ventriloquism. “The theme song is good, but I like everything about it. You’re thinking of Hawaii Five-O. That’s the one that has a super Mr. T song, but nobody likes the show.”

The fat man begins licking the glass in our direction with a fat spongy tongue. He is John, one of the two strangers that live in the back of the warehouse who have no connection to the inside of our home, who we do not speak to, who we collect rent from and don’t like. One of his hands is sweating a palmprint into the window, but I think he has the other one inside his pants. I don’t feel disturbed by him, even though he is jerking off to my own picture. I pretend not to notice.

But I begin to wonder how many perverted old men have masturbated to my picture in the past. It is quite possible that this performance took place very many times. Before I had God’s Eyes, it could have happened all the time. Like there are perverted old men everywhere, behind tinted glass, in public bathrooms, on balconies or behind holes drilled into walls, watching, masturbating, fantasizing about you. I wonder if anyone else ever thinks about this.

“I like the Greatest American Hero song the best,” says Christian. He hasn’t seen the perverted man.

“That’s a groobly one too. We should cover that song at the show tonight.”

“That’d be killer, guy. I’ll work on it.”

Battlestar Galactica really is my favorite show. I worship it. There’s something about science-fiction from the seventies that turns me dippy, something about the mixture of disco and futurism and sexy spandex space suits.

A figure, too fast for my God’s Eyes, passes John from the outside, John still licking the glass, saliva running the dust-window scent up a nostril. The figure enters.

It is Mort, another roommate. Christian’s best friend besides myself. He’s Japanese but never speaks his birth language. But he still carries the accent with him.

I enter my natural eyes and we turn to his attention.

Christian’s greetings: “Mortician, where have you been all day? I thought we were supposed to be playing a show here tonight.”

“I was getting a new distortion pedal,” Mort replies. “The one we have’s bust, and I looked all over town for one. Eventually, I got one from Lenny.”

“How good is it?”

“Not great, but it’ll do, me matey.”

Mort says me matey because he is obsessed with pirates, or the old-fashioned stereotype of pirates. He always dresses up pirate-like with a skull hat and eye-patch. And he speaks with a mock-pirate accent, which doesn’t work very well since his Japanese accent is so strong. The combination of Japanese and Pirate form a new accent of Mort’s own. It’s difficult to understand him at times, but Christian seems to catch his words clearly.

Mort turns to me:

“Arr, did you tell him, Leaf?” he asks me, motioning to Christian. A tremor shoots through my body. I heard him ask me the question, but I can’t come up with an answer.

“What?” I respond, unsteady.

“Did you tell him the news?”

I shrug.

“Tell me what?” Christian saves me from speaking.

“We rented out the other room.”

“Really? T’who?” Christian asks.

“To Satan,” Mort answers.

Christian pauses, his eyes bobbing. “There’s a guy nicknamed Satan ?”

“No, that’s his real name.”

“Someone named their kid Satan ?”

“No, it is Satan. The Satan. You know, the devil. And you’re not going to believe this, but he’s a fairy.”

“A fairy?”

“You know, a tart, a full-flaming homosexual. And he was even coming onto me. Who’d of thought the Lord of Darkness would be the Queen of Darkness?”

Christian laughs. “Mortician, you’re the biggest weirdo in the world, guy.”

I barge in with a soft yell, halfway upset. “I’m trying to watch Battlestar Galactica.”

“You can’t watch that there tele-rubish. We gotta get the place ready for the bastard show tonight.”

“I can’t help you,” I say, pointing to my eyes. “I’m disabled.”

“So am I,” Christian giggle-says. “I’m quadriplegic.”

Mort explodes at Christian. “Why am I the only person who does anything around here? I’ve been out searching for a damn distortion pedal all day to replace the one that you broke last week, and you’re probably going to break this one again tonight, and you won’t even help me set up the stage!”

“The last time I helped you, all you did was bitch at my sloppiness. I’ll help if I don’t have to do orders.”

“Arr, ye glimey bastards! Get the bloody hell out if ye be lazy arses,” Mort whines, turning the television off. “I don’t want you getting in me way.”

Mortician hates laziness. Maybe it’s a Japanese stereotype, but I think he’s just sick of being around groo-heads all the time. I ignore him, because I have no choice but to be lazy.

“Fine with me,” Christian says, and we get up to leave.

“Be back before eight,” Mort hiss-spurts.

Christian seems happy to get out of work, but now I don’t get to watch Battlestar Galactica.

And the room turns into a huge churn-wheeling machine as I stand. Thunder-shrieking into the ground and around my face, buzzing — as if I am polluted with bees, my hair honey-eaten. The ground absorbs me as I grossly to the door, rushing billow-rollers inside my head knocking me off balance. This always happens when I stand up from a long sit.

John is still licking the glass at Mort as we pass the window. I would tell him to go away, but I’ve forgotten how to talk.

Scene 3 The Effects of Sillygo

They have put shaggy carpeting down on the sidewalks, so now I can walk barefoot up the way, gleaming at caterpillar-kaleidoscope, squishy the fibers between my toes. I cough and put some phlegm onto the shag, cold on my heel when I massage it between threads.

Christian does not take off his shoes. I don’t mean just at this particular time. I mean he never takes off his shoes. I’ve known him for seven years and not for a second did I ever catch him without something on his feet, whether it be socks, boots, animal skins, plastic bags, towels, bandages, or small boxes. I’m thinking he has some deformity on his feet that he refuses to show anyone, or maybe he just hates going without shoes like the skin is too sensitive for the ground, or maybe he feels naked with bare feet. Personally, I find shoes to be crude customers and try to wear them as seldom as possible. That’s why I’m glad there is carpeting on sidewalks now.

Christian has been drinking from a bottle of Fool’s Gold — a secondary brand of gold cinnamon schnapps — for the past five minutes. Actually, he has been drinking it every day for the past five years. It contains flakes of gold that dazzle-flutter through the liqueur if shaken, and they continue to dance in your stomach bag after you swallow them. I wonder if the gold flakes are bad for your digestive system.

I tell him: “I bet your entire stomach is gold-coated by now.”

He tells me: “You can bet your penis on that one.”

We head to Baja-Style Mexican Food Stand that is up in the tower shops — which are shops that are stacked and stacked and stacked on top of each other, like the autocars in the autocar junkyard. The shops all lofty and weaky, constructed by amateurs, ready to collapse at any day. Several ladders and splinter-rickety spiral stairs go from shop to shop to shop to shop.

We go up a ladder for three shops to a ledge, take another ladder through the floor of a sewing store, then through a wood shop, then through a small school for autistic children. The roof of the tower owns the food shops; one food shop being the Mexican burrito store that we always-always eat at. And it’s very surprising that the best Mexican food in the entire world is in Rippington, New Canada.

Up here, there’s a large cage with a female baboon inside, the baboon squawking and slapping at herself, eye-goobers sliming into her facial fur, sticking. We always eat where we can see the baboon, watching her sit there all miserable and squawking, slapping, rolling in my swirl-vision.

People keep female baboons at the tops of tall Rippington buildings to scare away scorpion flies. It all started last year, when a swarm of them migrated through the walm and took up residence in our sky.

Along with the prowler beast, a scorpion fly is one of the most dangerous species to come out of the walm. The scorpion fly looks half dragonfly and half scorpion, but is about two feet long. You’ll never find one by itself, only the mass, like a violent cloud in the distance. They feed off of whatever animal they can find, but humans are the most common meat besides bird. And, since they’re allergic to the ground, they live, sleep, and breed in the air.

A common warning in Rippington is: “Be cautious in high air.”

I’ve heard they are silent, stalking very furtively, sneaking up on you from above without your notice. Then they use their stinger in the back of your neck, and the poison is enough to paralyze you for a good three hours. During that time, the swarm devours you with limbs that resemble tridents made of corn-patterned bone. And they secrete digestive fluids from glands on their faces, to make your meat soft and easy. Nobody survives an attack from the swarm, unless in a large crowd with plenty of luck. They are too many to dodge or kill and they are too quick to run away from, but their victims are usually unaware of the scorpion flies and do not own time enough to react.

The only defense against them is a female baboon with nyminits, which are parasites that live within their female sex organs, and are fatal to the scorpion fly if ingested. Since the scorpion fly has no predators and is immune to almost every disease, the nyminits brought an unusual scare into its beady intellect. Now scorpion flies are too frightened to go within a mile radius of any female baboon.

Of course, they’ll eat the baboon’s husband if she isn’t nearby. And I bet the wife baboon thinks that this is funny sometimes, because if they get into a fight she can threaten to leave. Then the male baboon has to apologize immediately.

She says, “I’ll let the scorpion flies get you then.”

Into my God’s Eyes:

I see Christian and Leaf munching greasy burritos at a crispy table. Staring down from the pole which holds a tower shops flag — patchworked together from scraps of cloth. Slobbering and smacking sounds orchestrate their environment before a word is spoken.

The baboon squawks and slaps at herself.

Christian gorges into his burrito, squeezing green sauce into his throat, and some leftover gravy, washing it all down with Fool’s Gold.

“These are always Mr. T, guy,” Christian says with his mouth full. He always speaks with food in his mouth, and not just because he has lousy table manners, but because he thinks talking is much more fun when you can taste the words. “I wish they’d hire me as a fulltime burrito-eater.”

“That’d be a super Mr. T job,” I say.

Mr. Tis the word that replaced cool and dudical. It’s based on the guy from the television show called the A-Team and the movie Rocky III (getting the role by winning a bouncer contest, which included a midget toss). Back in the eighties, Mr. T was the epitome of cool and dudical.

Christian continues, “Even though they make them out of dog meat.”

My head is shaking no. “I bet it’s only cat meat.”

“It’s gotta be dog. Cats wouldn’t taste this good.”

“What have you got against cats?”

“They suck. I fucking hate them.”

“Doesn’t mean they taste bad…”

“I don’t care. They fucking suck.”

Leaf says, “I bet the carne asada is the dog and the carnitas is the cat.”

“No, carnitas is pork.”

“No way. I tried making a burrito with pork at home and it tastes nothing like the carnitas meat here.”

“Was it good at all?”

“It blew.”

The baboon squawks.

Christian asks, “Well, if carnitas is cat and carne asada is dog, what do you think chorizo is?”

“Guts and intestines and all that good stuff.”

“Really?”

“Sure. The man who invented it was a damn genius.”

“Well, you’d have to be a genius to make intestines and tongues taste good.”

“And rectums too.”

The baboon slaps.

I let God’s Eyes wander:

They go to a small bookstore at the bottom of the Tower Shops where the only popular author in the world is signing books. Yes, people still read books. But only out of habit. And they’ll only read the one extremely popular writer. Nobody cares to look for new ones, because they think: “He must be good if ten billion copies were printed and the cover says bestseller.”

Even if the book is terrible, they’ll buy it. Because people must read something for every last hour of every day, right before going to sleep. It doesn’t have to be good reading. It doesn’t have to be educational or enlightening. It doesn’t have to be imaginative or even entertaining. It just has to be common to the rest of the world — a book by an author everyone has heard of, so novel conversations can be more convenient.

Everyone who reads artistic novels — and there are very-very few — calls this BIG author the mega-sellout. This is what I call him too, but I don’t read novels. My eyes roll so much that I can only read comic books.

Eventually, reading altogether will be forgotten as a habit and then become nonexistent to the human world.

Writing is not an art, it is a business. It doesn’t matter what the author writes, as long as it is written quickly and is something everyone can relate to. Actually, the mega-sellout can be long-long dead already and some twice-as-terrible author can be writing books under his name, and the world will still buy the imposter’s books, even if it is completely obvious that he’s a fake.

And nobody cares. Not even me.

There is a line that goes from down the street, through the store, to the mega-sellout’s table. He’s signing a book for a nerdy wearing magnifying glasses. The nerdy doesn’t actually need glasses, but since he’s a nerdy it is his obligation to wear thick-thick glasses, even if they are fake. The author hands the book back to him.

“Thanks,” says Nerdy. “You’re the best author in the whole world.”

“Of course,” says Mega-Sellout.

Nan is the next in line. She wears dark long-limbed clothes and she’s bald with the words blonde hair tattooed on her head where the hair should have been. She drops a red book onto the table.

“This isn’t my book,” says Mega-Sellout.

“So?” Nan replies. The author bearing a suffer-dazed face. “This is a book signing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but for my book. Not…” he glances at the cover, “Mark Amerika’s.”

“But I didn’t like your book. This one’s way better. Sign it.”

“Why should I? It’s not mine.”

“You always sign your own books. Why can’t you sign someone else’s for a change?”

“Go away you weird person.”

“R. Kelly signed my Ratt CD.”

“GET OUT!”

Nan leaves the store.

She’s a friend of mine. Well, sort of. She is the girlfriend of one of my friend/roommates besides Mort and Christian. She never talks to me, probably because I never talk to her, but I still consider her a friend. Christian doesn’t really get along with her either, but they consider each other friends too. Girls find Christian disgusting and creepy, probably because he is.

We meet her outside the tower shops, Christian still drinking gold flakes. The proper greetings are exchanged and we get down to business. I call it business, but what I’m really meaning to is: finding a way to fight boredom. It’s hard to find anything interesting to do in a world that has gone boring, but every day we try to do something exciting, always keeping busy, so that we don’t end up like the world outside of Rippington. It is necessary.

“So what’s going on tonight?” Nan asks, scratching at a hole in the armpit of her shirt.

“We got the show,” Christian says, “but there’s not much else to do.”

“There’s always something to do. You just got to figure out what that something is.”

“We could go drink…” Christian says. “I’m already buzzing, but I can get you something.”

“I don’t have that much money.” Nan squeezes her face inward like she always does. I think it’s her poor attempt at being cute. Nan is rather attractive, even though she’s a skinhead girl, but she’s too much of a tough guy to be cute.

“Are you kidding?” Christian chuckles. “You’re the richest bitch I know.”

She punches him. A common thing for Nan to do and Christian never punches her back.

I decide to speak. “We could go see Satan.”

Nan sneers at me as if I did something wrong.

I continue, word-staggering, “He moved into the empty room… behind the warehouse… by John’s.”

“I thought Mortician was just joking about that, guy.” Christian drinks some gold.

“No, it’s really Satan, the devil.”

“What is he doing here? Trying to lay the world to waste?”

“He’s opening a chain of fast food restaurants called Satan Burger, home of the deep-fried hamburger.”

“Sounds good,” Christian says.

“Sounds disgusting,” Nan says.

I say, “The first one opened up in the village. I want to go.”

Christian complains, “We can’t do that now. We just ate. Not to mention the village is too far to walk to. Maybe after the show.”

Then the three of us realize the boredom sinking in.

I stare down at the jambling carpet-sidewalk, warding off a shrug.

This is what I can see with my other eyes:

Mort is with the third of my roommates, who is Gin — a rattle-lofty fellow with hippie dreadlocks and shoes that don’t match, and he wears a shirt that says Nan’s Boyfriend. Mort is trying to set up the stage, getting little help from Gin as he never gets help from anyone. Gin just stands there, watching Mort set up the drums, drinking from his mega-drink.

“Arr, help me ye glimey bastard!” Mort says.

“I’m on break,” Gin responds.

“Hand me that cymbal.”

Gin slurps his mega-drink.

“Oi!”

The cymbal is tossed near Mort, crash-smashing.

There are five taps at the door.

“There he is,” Gin says.

“There who is?” Mort asks.

“Didn’t Nan tell you?”

Mort shrugs. Five more taps.

“I finally got you a piper.”

“Your brother’s back from Germany?”

“Yeah.” Five more taps. “The psycho looks like a techno-goth now. He says he’s ready to release his soul into the body and shaft of the music or some weird shit like that.”

Taptaptaptaptap.

They stare at each other. Gin slurps his mega-drink.

“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Mort asks.

Gin slurps his drink.

Pause.

Taptaptaptaptap.

Slurp.

“I’m on break,” Gin says.

“You tit.”

Taptaptap…

Mort staggers from the drum pieces, across to the door and opens to the tapper, who is Vod — a depression-faced, robot vampire of a man, dark clothes, pale skin, and… a bagpipe.

“Hello. I am Vodka.” His voice an emotionless, fake German accent. “But people do not call me Vodka. They call me Vod.”

“I’m Mort.”

“Yes, but people do not call you Mort. They call you Mortician. That is very amusing.”

“Come in then.” Mort swells with boredom in Vod’s immediate presence.

Vodka creeps into the warehouse with his fingers stretched out like batwings. Dracula-eyes scoping the details of the warehouse. Then he freezes in mid-step when he sees the toilet situated in the middle of the room. He turns to Gin and raises an eyebrow, then glances back at the toilet.

“I find your toilet most delectable,” he says. “It beckons me to sit upon it.”

Without asking permission, he sits, slowly, preparing for ultimate gratification… and a satisfying smile cracks the corners of his face. “Wonderful.”

Pause.

Mort says, “So you’re the lad with the bagpipes?”

“Ja,” Vod says, “and I’m so excited to release my soul into their shafts, and to become one with my music, that I cannot resist an erection.”

Mort’s face contorts, turning to Gin. “Wanna come with me to get the rent from John?”

“Get it yourself,” Gin says.

“I’m not going to John’s by myself. He’s… old.”

“Then take Vodka.”

Vod exclaims, “I DO NOT WISH TO LEAVE THE TOILET SEAT.”

Gin, sipping at the mega-drink, scratching a soft spot on his hip, and Mort, swinging a saber, pass an Abraham Lincoln midget as they stroll behind the warehouse.

They get to a fire engine red door in the back of the warehouse. A BIG doggie door covers half the entrance, with a sign reading, “Beware of Doggie.”

A questioning face emerges from Mort’s neck.

“That’s a big doggie door,” Gin says. “I didn’t think there were doggies that size.”

“Thought I told John he’s not allowed to have pets,” Mort says. “Arr.”

Mort hums the door buzzer.

Gin says, “Maybe it’s to scare away burglars and Mormons.”

Mort buzzes again. “He’s not answering.”

“But he’s always here.” Gin buzzes.

Pause.

Gin rubs his neck, sipping the mega-drink. “Look through the doggie door.”

“No, thanks,” says Mort, “I don’t want to see the doggie that needs a door that big.”

Gin laughs. “Afraid?”

“Arr!” Mort flips him off. “You do it.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Go ahead then.”

“I will.”

“Then do it.”

“I will.”

Gin bends down, scratching a breast.

“Then do it.”

“Shut up, I’m doing it.” Gin throws open the doggie door and looks inside.

But first:

Spin-feelings rush into Gin, giving form to a large orange structure in Gin’s head which is a living being quite like the cross between a tapeworm and an apartment building. This creature is the offspring of Gin’s hangover, and Gin’s head is the incubator, pulsating warmth. It takes twenty-four hours before it will leave into the outside world, and Gin will have to bear its pain until then. He gets this infant in his head many times a week from drinking too much hard alcohol — which, of course, is gin.

And with the infant/creature handing him a blood-rushing of the head, Gin doesn’t realize the doggie on the inside of the doggie door. The doggie being of a certain breed that no one has ever seen before. It is the John breed. Well, it is actually just John himself, naked and on all fours, growling with foam. A fat, bald, middle-aged man that thinks he is an attack doggie.

Then, just as an attack doggie would, John flies toward the intruder, splashing the mega-drink between them. And Gin screams out, flap-dashing down the street with the human doggie chasing him, barking.

And Mort bends down to pick up the rent money settled on the ground just within the door, inside of an envelope with two flowers and a pencil and four paper clips and some breakfast, and the bills have little smiles drawn onto the president faces in blue ink.

The naked doggie springs at Gin’s legs, thumping him to the ground, handing him a large number of claw-scratchings.

The Abraham Lincoln midget comes to save the young man from further injuries, rapping John-doggie on the scalp with a rolled-up newspaper, which angers the wannabe doggie, turning to Lincoln midget and biting his pant leg, thrashing it about.

Gin darts away.

Mort, from a distance, gives a cluttered face — a confused spectator watching John chase Lincoln down the street, barking and biting at his ankles.

Back to me:

I find myself reading a Mutilation Man comic book at a corner store/liquor store, and I’m not positive how I got here. Mutilation Man swirls off the page and hides under the magazine rack, which looks more like a transformer in my eyes.

Christian and Nan are searching the shelves for nice cheap liquor.

“What you want?” Christian asks, swarming his arm around Nan’s stomach.

“I don’t know. They’re all too expensive.”

“Just pick one. You can afford it.”

“Well, you’re hasty all of a sudden.”

“Bite me.”

She bites him on the chubby part of his shoulder and he screams a laugh. Then she grabs a bottle of Fork’s Gum for him.

“Whiskey?” amazed at her choice. She usually drinks butter almond rum.

Christian takes it to the cashier, a brown-haired, blond mustache-bearing man, who has never slept with a woman under the age of forty, who is now reading a newspaper.

Christian puts the bottle and his ID onto the counter.

The cashier looks up from his paper. “Eight even,” he says.

Nan throws some crumpled bills. The cashier glances at the cash and then tosses them back. “Sorry, I can’t accept this.” He goes back to his paper.

“Why not?”

“I don’t accept American money.”

Christian and Nan stare at him for a few minutes.

“How can you not accept American money in an American store?” Christian asks.

“For your information, this store isn’t in America. It’s in New Zealand.”

“No, it’s not. It’s in America.”

The cashier slams the newspaper. “Didn’t you read the sign?”

“What sign?”

The cashier jumps over the counter to the glass of the door and picks up a small piece of notebook paper with four words written in magic marker.

It reads:

WELCOME TO NEW ZEALAND

The he tapes it back to the glass.

“Real funny,” Christian groans.

“I’m not joking. The dirt underneath this store is owned by New Zealand.”

“Sure it is.”

“Hawaii’s not attached to the U.S., but it’s still considered part of the country.”

“Yeah, but Hawaii’s surrounded by water, not another country.”

“Hey, Mr. Man, I own this store and it’s going to be in whichever country I want it to be in! Actually, I don’t want it to be in New Zealand anymore.” He crosses out New Zealand and writes in another country.

Now it reads:

WELCOME TO VENEZUELA

The cashier is proud of himself. “There. Now we’re in Venezuela and you can’t buy that whiskey unless you have Venezuelan money.”

Nan comes in. Her expression says I’m sick of this.

She punches the cashier in the face. He screams straight to the ground.

“My tongue is broken,” the Cashier cries.

Nan takes the money and the whiskey, walking toward the door. “What are you going to do, call the Venezuelan police?”

The cashier bleeds.

As we leave the store, we discover that the sun is ready to go in for the night, heading back home to his wife and kiddies, who are all sit-waiting for him to come down to them with crab sticks and dinner rolls perched on their flowery kitchen counter.

On his way over the horizon, the sun accidentally brushes against a mountain range and catches the landscape on fire.

And as the sunset becomes a forest of flames and red-orange swirls with smoky demons crawling their way to the cloud people, and as the abstracted vegetation and forest creatures fall over in disgust, all that Mr. Sun says about his action is this:

“Sorry about catching you on fire. I’ll try to be more careful tomorrow.”

Scene 4 History Comes Alive

The warehouse spits a wad of throat-snot onto a passerby and then goes about its daily routine of sulking in its foundation. When the passerby insists the warehouse explain itself, the warehouse waves him away with a little wooden finger and calls him a log of boob poop.

The warehouse doesn’t realize, however, that there is a group of Gorguals nearby. Gorguals are an alien race that excrete food-waste from their breasts, which work like buttocks. And there’s a hole — the breast hole — between both mounds, which lean forward over a toilet for defecation. In other words, their boobs poop. The Gorguals don’t take offense to the warehouse’s boob poop comment since they do not speak English or the language that warehouses speak; and even if they did speak English or Warehouse they would not have taken offense because crapping (an informal term) is accepted socially within their culture. Translated from Gordual tongue, the term crapping is referred to as stool liberation.

The sun is gone, eating dinner with his family, and the warehouse is taken by old Earth-toys, all punks and skinheads mauling each other and skreaking, which makes the warehouse very bitter and inclined to spit at passing ones on its carpet walkway.

Inside of the warehouse’s guts, a concert is in session. A legion of color shuffles soundly, merrily around and round-a-go. I am behind the stage, muzzy from the round-a-go crowd movements and all the shifty colors, ticking sick.

My band is playing already, but I am not yet onstage, liquor-inhaling.

Christian is running the performance, rape-screeching and scratching sheet metal with Mortician, who plays his distorted bass with a knife and a cellular phone. We are an electronic noise band, which is a very popular Japanese food creation. Actually, I didn’t mean to say electronic noise is a very popular Japanese food creation, though it is a genre of music invented by the Japanese music underground.

This is what I meant to say: the name of our band is A Very Popular Japanese Food Creation.

Very few people in the room enjoy our style of music, even though they mosh and punch each other as if dancing to it. They’re all waiting for the headlining brutal oi!/punk skinhead band to play, and that will be the start of a large kicking/punching/fork-through-the-skull festival I assure you.

Within the center of the room, there are two things: one is Vod, who is sitting on the toilet playing his bagpipes to the electronic noise, and the other thing is a history book that smells of rotten human.

History books and rotten humans are two things that you’ll always find in a graveyard. Long ago, you could only find rotten humans there and never any history books, and this made the cemetery a very boring place to visit. My mother told me, long before I came to hate her, that the whole point of going to the cemetery was to visit gravestones and a plot of dirt, where you were to put flowers if you had the money for them.

Now the whole point of going to the cemetery is to read history books. Let me explain:

It started when all the governments of the world decided that it would be a very neat idea for everyone and everyone to write journals of their lives, including every day, every moment, every thought, every person, every creation, and every thing important to each individual from day to day to day to death, so that everyone will have their memories and their life story written down, to live eternally after department. But only two copies were to be made. One is sewn into the stomach of the deceased and the other is for the public to read.

A Gravestone is not just a stone with a name and a date to another date anymore. It now has a little waterproof/airproof drawer inside that contains the autobiography of the person buried beneath. And ever since I was a child, I’ve been going to the cemetery and reading the lives of the dead. And every time I read about someone, that someone becomes alive again.

Not too many people care to read history books anymore. Nobody even cares to write them; even I have given them up due to my acid ocean eyes. I still go to the cemetery and look at the pictures and titles, but it’s disappointing to know that I can’t read them entirely.

They don’t let you steal the history books. It’s very important that you don’t, for history’s sake. But they don’t have any security guards to stop you, only the gatekeeper, and he doesn’t really care. Still, I’ve never heard of anyone stealing a history book besides myself.

I stole The Story of Richard Stein.

It was such a great history that I had to keep it. But I still had respect for the readers of the books of the dead, especially the readers of Richard Stein, so I didn’t take the book on display. I thief-slithered onto his grave one night and dug that old corpse up. I stab-cut into his gut with some pizza shears — which was quite the ass painting — and filched the book resting inside. It’s just as good, but it has a rotten Richard Stein smell on it. It’s the only book that I try to read other than comics. But I already know the majority of it by heart.

His words are called wisdom by the critics on the back cover.

Richard Stein has taught me much about the world we live in. His book is my bible. Well, something had to be. The real bible is very boring, being on the level of a bad coffee table magazine. Not that I hate everything the bible says. Personally, I agree with most of the biblical messages, I guess, but I just think the writers weren’t any good. Matthew and Mark were okay, but Luke and some others told as drome a story as a ten-hundred-page book about dentistry. (Just in case you didn’t know, drome means boring and droll means interesting, so you don’t get confused.)

The Richard Stein Bible is more like a guide to being alive than it is the story of his life. It doesn’t seem like his story at all, actually, because he wrote it in the third person, which is one reason why I decided to read his book instead of all the other histories. It is next to impossible to read every history book in the cemetery, not to mention it’s not worth reading them all since many people live very drome lifestyles. So I had to judge the whole book on reading the first paragraph, hoping it would be an interesting attention-grabber.

Richard Stein’s first paragraph was:

“The main thing that keeps the gun away from your head is thirteen hundred bottles of bourbon, eight hundred bottles of vodka, three hundred bottles of gin, two thousand bottles of rum, six cups of everclear, and four hundred twenty-two bottles of southern comfort during the course of a lifetime; but any more than that and you’ll be considered an alcoholic. Richard Stein was considered an alcoholic.”

Nan is in the round-a-go crowd with a chunky blue-haired woman named Liz, who says she has sex with small mammals. They are at a table, sitting on milk crates, sitting with two Harvey Wallbangers and two walrus-shaped skinhead guys who are trying to take both girls home with them, thinking their red suspenders are attractive enough to surpass walrus-shaped features.

“Your friends are pretty Mr. T, Nan,” Liz says, letting one of the skinheads’ hands reach around her dimpled thigh. “But I was expecting another punk band.”

Nan punches the zit-bearded skinhead, just for looking at her. “Yeah, they suck, but they’d rather have everyone hate them. I think that’s the point of being in a noise band.”

Zit Beard doesn’t leave, finding Nan’s violent reactions arousing. He snuggles her shoulder and she punches him in his tits. A smile cats up on his BIG red face, and he does it again, whisper-caressing her stomach this time — not because he wants to turn her on, but because he wants her to punch him again, hopefully harder. She elbows him in the neck. Very stimulating.

“Have you seen Gin lately, Liz?” Nan asks, elbowing Zit Beard once more for a diversion, accepting the fact that administering pain to someone other than herself is a rather enjoyable performance.

But Liz finds the act of allowing a blubber-filled shirtless skinhead rub his hand all over the insides of her clothes a more enjoyable performance. She forgets to reply to Nan’s question among all the fat-sweaty sensuality. Instead, she asks another question: “When do you want me to return that Hertzan Chimera book? I haven’t finished it, but I don’t think I’ll be able to.”

“What about Gin?” Nan asks.

“What?”

“Gin. Have you seen him?”

“I think he went on a beer run with Lenny and the guy from the first band.”

“Thanks.” Nan gets up, kicking Zit Beard on the way, and scuffling into a round-a-go crowd.

I appear on stage — swirl-swirl goes the crowd and the color-blooming makes my eyes sizzle — with my cello and my T-shirt that reads Battlestar Galactica 4 Life. I play a short slimy cello solo and then the song curdles into a blur of discord before it ends.

The crowd does not seem to notice we are here.

Vodka leaps from the toilet, stampers onto the stage, into our faces. “I WAS SUPPOSED TO DO MY BAGPIPE SOLO AFTER THE CELLO INTRO,” he screams, though his scream is non-exclamatory because of his anti-emotional attitude. He shoves Christian, thrashes the sheet metal, and rammer-runs through the warehouse, but his movements still seem robot-like.

The crowd doesn’t seem to notice Vodka’s outrage.

“This is our last song,” Christian says to the crowd. “It’s called The Greatest American Hero Theme Song.”

We play some gak-shrilling noises and squeal, but it sounds nothing like the original theme song. Before the music ends, we are kicked off of our own stage by a band of five skinheads. The singer (Zit Beard) takes the mic from Christian, pushing him into the crowd who beat him up cruel. Zit Beard spits on the crowd and everyone cheers.

In other words: ZIT BEARD = PUNK.

“We’re the Oi!s,” says Zit Beard. “Our first song is about smashing capitalism and breaking fascism and stomping religion and destroying all the governments of the world. It’s called PUNK ROCK!”

This is what he sings:

“PUNK ROCK! PUNK ROCK! OI! OI! OI!”

The punk kids are into songs like this. They cheer and jump and punch each other until the song ends half a minute later.

“Thanks,” he says. “Our next song is called ANARCHY!”

Nan gets herself outside to find Gin, but there is no Gin. She meets someone named Lenny instead, scurries over to him, stepping over a flattened little Abraham Lincoln hat.

She calls, “Lenny!”

He mopes around, all drunk and finished, was puking in the back lot, wiping some yellow off his chin. Lenny is a thin little guy, antsy stickman, so it didn’t take much beer to make him vomity drunk. He wears old lady glasses and a shirt that says, Kiss me, I’m Yugoslavian.

“Where’s Gin?” she asks him. “Liz said he went with you.”

“Oh yeah,” his voice cracks in a drunken sort of way, “Gin told me to tell you he’ll be at Stag’s place. I would’ve gone with them, but they wanted to stop off at Satan Burger, and… I’m Vegan Hardcore you know.”

Her face crimps up all red, squeezing her fists. “That cunt is dead. I told him not to go anywhere without telling me.”

Lenny shakes his head at Nan for acting the tough guy and walks away. “Well, I should get going then.”

“Lenny,” she stops him with her awkward voice, “You have a truck, don’t you?”

He turns back around, “Look, Nan, it’s not that I don’t want to take you…”

She grabs him by the wrist and drag-pulls him toward his truck. “Come on. We still might be able to catch him at Satan Burger if we hurry.”

Nan has many-many problems besides her tough-guy-dominating-Gin routine. She’s also manic-depressive, she’s missing half of her right lung, she’s an insomniac, and she’s always having problems with her sexual identity (An abusive father and three older brothers raised her as a boy). This kind of upbringing could have turned her into a lesbian, but since she is disgusted enough just being a woman, there’s not even the slightest chance that she would get the desire to have sex with one.

Richard Stein said that the only thing children need to do to keep the guns away from their heads is to have pets of their very own. A dog or a cat or a gerbil or even a goldfish would suffice, keeping their fragile little minds on the pets instead of on the nasty juices that society likes to spit at them. Pets may be just small creatures to adults, but they’re gifts of good mental health to the kids. Some children are allergic to animals, though, and tend to avoid owning them; and not owning an animal as a child ruins the perfect cure for keeping the gun away from the head once adulthood arrives. This sometimes results in what people call a bad childhood, and what a bad childhood does is make a person bitter.

Bitteris what we call Nan.

The only pet Nan ever had was a small black duck. She named it Chico and one time her father decided it was food and ate it. He was drunk and thought it would be a funny way to show off to his hairy shirtless friends.

The worst of Nan’s problems had nothing to do with visualizing poor Chico digesting inside of her spiteful father’s beerbelly. Actually, the worst of her problems had nothing to do with her father at all.

You see, Nan loves Jesus Christ very-very much. She’s deeply in love with him. Obsessively in love with him. And I don’t mean in a good-mannered sense of the word love. I mean she’s sex-erotically in love with him. She talks about how she wants to strip him to his crown of thorns, whip him until he bleeds salty red and the blood dribbles down his body until her nipples get hard and her sauce starts bubbling. Then she envisions screwing him violent-sinful, while he is nailed to the cross, dying-dying. And she fantasizes about fucking him until he’s dead on the cross, and then fucking him until he resurrects.

It all started when she was eleven and going through puberty. All her friends were boys, of course, and would talk about a thing called masturbation. (Richard Stein, by the way, said that masturbation is God’s gift to ugly people who have trouble finding any other way of obtaining sexual gratification, like myself.) They told her it’s all about fantasizing intercourse with the opposite sex. But she always felt she was the opposite sex, so she couldn’t fantasize about boys without feeling gay, and she thought of girls as stupid and disgusting, so both sexes were ruled out. The only person she could think of that she loved was Jesus — let me remind you she didn’t know the difference between Jesus-love and sex-love back then — so the savior, Jesus Christ, became her first masturbation fantasy.

Nowadays Nan masturbates to paintings of him all the time.

Around Christmas, you can see a strange glimmer in her eyes, like the spirit of Christmas is generating all kinds of nerve-tinglings on her insides, forcing her squeeze-excited. Even the nativity scenes get her sweat glands drip-drip-dripping.

Gin says that sometimes she’ll let out a BIG Ho! Ho! Ho! when she climaxes on him. “I think I like that,” he says. Christmas is a happy time for Gin too.

The strangest part of Nan’s Jesus-sex fantasies is that she gets the most aroused by visualizing Jesus going to the bathroom. She likes to picture him on a toilet, or crouching down in the bushes, or peeing over a balcony onto a crowd of his followers. Sometimes she imagines dropping a log on Jesus while he is being crucified (Richard Stein says that when you drop a log of sexual excrement onto your partner it is called a Hot Carl or sometimes a Dirty Sanchez, if you were wondering) or even squatting over his face to pee in his mouth.

Richard Stein said that the whole process of digestion and egestion of waste material is considered sexually stimulating to many people, even though it’s socially unacceptable to admit. However, very few people dare to watch that kind of thing and even less dare to participate in the act.

Nowhere does Stein mention anything about Jesus Christ being actively involved in sexual performances with excrement or being dominated on his crucifix. It’s not a very common topic for discussion, I am guessing.

I go to the inside of an autocar:

Stag — a shirtless guy with spiked hair and a tattoo of his own face on his face — is indulging in his favorite pastime: drunk driving. The road is empty and Gin in the passenger seat changing through radio stations and nervous-sweating over it, as if it’s dangerous to leave one on for over a second.

“Watch this,” Stag says, a grumpy-goof voice.

He lets go of the wheel and begins to slam a beer, with the autocar leaking into the left lanes. But before the autocar goes over any curbs, he finishes the beer, crushes it into his skull, slam-seizes the wheel, and straightens the autocar back out.

“Pretty Mr. T, eh?” he says.

Gin’s buzz is wearing him down to sarcasm. “Yeah, great.”

“I can do it every time. Never fails.”

“Impressive.”

“How many beers are left?” Stag asks the back seat.

“One,” says the back seat.

“Who drank ‘em all?”

The back seat burps. “Sorry.”

“You asshole. I paid for twelve of those, not five.”

“Sorry,” says the back seat.

“Give me the last one.” Stag claws his hand over his shoulder.

The back seat reaches the last beer over Stag’s neck, but the autocar hits a bump and the beer rolls out the window.

“DAMN IT,” Stag cries.

“Sorry.” The back seat is too drunk to care.

The brakes slam. “I’m still gonna drink it.” And he jumps out of the car to look for his crippled beer. Instead of a beer, Stag finds a dead jogger.

“Whoa… Fuck yeah!” he exclaims to the dead person, but the dead person isn’t listening.

Gin gets out of the autocar in response to the whoa… fuck yeah, asking, “What is it?”

“A dead guy.”

“Did you kill him?”

“Maybe.” Stag daze-smiles, kind of proud. “What should we do with it?”

Gin’s gut kinks up. “There’s gotta be all sorts of Mr. T stuff we can do with a dead guy.”

They pause to think about all sorts of stuff.

“We can give it to my uncle,” Gin says. “He’s a taxidermist. We can get him stuffed and mounted on the front of our stage at the warehouse.”

Another pause.

“What I think is… we should strap it to the roof of my car and drive around town so we can pick up goth chicks.”

“Yeah,” Gin says. “Dead bodies turn them on.”

The warehouse is asleep now. It was very tired and told all of our guests to leave immediately. Normally, a crowd of tough guy skinheads would not give in to the threats of a warehouse, but our particular warehouse can be rather intimidating when it’s cranky.

Now I am alone in my own room, watching a Grim Reaper poster jingle-dancing up the walls, striking cello strings like a drum. Grim Reaper and other butt rock bands are very popular these days. Back when they were touring you’d get beaten for listening to them. But now they are funny and everyone loves them.

In other words: BUTT ROCK = PUNK.

My room is nothing more than a janitor’s closet that can only hold my body and a mattress. A whole bed couldn’t fit inside, so I just put the mattress on the ground. I can’t sleep on an entire bed anyway. If I sleep too far away from the ground, I get sucked out of my body and hover in the air above it. And believe me, it’s pretty hard to fall asleep when you’re floating outside of your body.

Richard Stein said that sleep is the best part of your life. Many people take sleep for granted and don’t think to appreciate its beauty, but Richard Stein said his sleep was quite beautiful. If you do not find satisfaction in something as simple as sleep, you might never find satisfaction in something as BIG as life. Being without satisfaction makes you bitter, so it is best to obtain it wherever you can.

Also: a man who enjoys sleep never puts a gun to his head, he just sleeps his problems away. This is because death and sleep are very similar states, due to their tranquil conflict-less characteristics. So the suicidal man can trick his brain into thinking he is dead, when he is actually just asleep. However, it can be a very dangerous thing to trick your brain into thinking sleep and death are so related, because if a person is very tired and can’t fall asleep at night, he might pick up a gun and shoot his skull across the room. And I’m sure he’d feel pretty stupid the next morning, when he finds out that he traded his brain to the wall for a good night of sleep.

At this time, Christian is entering my room. He doesn’t emerge fully, because of his claustrophobia, standing by the doorway instead. I can see Vodka far behind him, on the toilet in a stare, caressing his bagpipes and the porcelain.

“Do you want to go to Satan Burger now?” he asks.

I look up at Grim Reaper joy-tumbling, Christian splashing. Pieces of fish meat falling from the ceiling. “Yeah. How we gonna get there?”

“I didn’t think that far.” Then Christian yells to Mort, who is putting all of the equipment away and getting no help from anybody, as usual, “Mortician, did you get your bus fixed yet?”

“No,” Mort says within working, “I probably won’t be able to until next week or next month.”

Mort’s bus hasn’t been working all year. He gets it fixed every month, but it only works for a couple of days before it needs fixing again. It is always polluting the back of the warehouse. If it was a normal autocar I wouldn’t care, but this is a bus. Not a VW Bus, I mean a full-sized school bus, laced with graffiti and bullet holes.

I point to Vodka, whispering, “What about him?”

Christian turns to Vodka. “Vod, got a car?”

Vod is in a trance.

“Vodka!”

He snaps hard out and twitches at Christian.

“Do you have a car?”

Vod glimmers down to his bagpipes. “I do.” Then up to Christian again. “It is only the most luscious and vigorous piece of machinery UPON THIS INSIGNIFICANT PLANET.”

“Well, can you drive us to Satan Burger?”

Silence.

Vodka continues a trance at Christian until his face turns dirty, the toilet seat sweats round pools into his buttocks.

He coldly answers, “Certainly.”

Christian claps his hands together. “Great. Let’s go then,” heading toward his next bottle of liquor, and his polyester jacket.

“NOT YET,” Vodka howls at him. “There are rules in my car that must not be taken lightly. If you break any one of them you’ll be THROWN OUT INTO THE STREET AND BANNED FROM MY CAR FOREVER.”

Vodka’s autocar turns out to be an AMC Gremlin, not the usual style of car to be remarked as luscious or vigorous, but some people seem to like them. It is sparkling black with silver lightning bolts on the doors and large metal wings attached to the back end. Vodka approaches the front and cuddles to it, warming the cold metal.

“It is more powerful than life itself, isn’t it?” he says.

A smile cracks Christian’s lips, not concerning Vodka though. He has remembered the most essential thing to remember upon entering a vehicle.

He yells, “SHOTGUN,” and we all grunt.

Mort argues, “Paper-rock-scissors, ye bastard.”

Christian argues, “I already called it.”

Vodka barges in, “NONE OF YOU SIT IN FRONT. I get both front seats in my car.”

“We can’t all fit in the back seat,” Mort whines.

“How dreadful,” Vod responds.

We pile into the Gremlin, with my corpse squished in the bitch seat. Vod starts up the car and takes a few essence-breaths into his lungs, humming with the engine purrs.

Vodka is one of those people who loves everything that is bizarre and disturbing and dreary and dead. Richard Stein called these people Black People, because they always wear black clothes and sometimes listen to black metal. He said that these people become black from hating everything.

They only like things that nobody else likes, and that is because they hate everyone else. Once their favorite underground band becomes popular, they won’t like it anymore. Not because it isn’t good anymore, but because they can’t stand to see normal people listening to their favorite band. That is why many of them turn to black metal, because that style of music can only be found in Germany and the Scandinavian countries.

He also went on to say that the leader of the black metal scene was a small troll who could only speak in ancient druidic languages.

After Vod finishes his car-meditation, he blesses the steering wheel. Then we leave for Satan Burger.

Scene 5 Silence Hurts the Eye

Stag and Gin and a corpse strapped to the roof, all drunk-slobbering and bobble-stupid. Up a sideling sludge hill, where crab-thorn trees and scorpion flies live — no female baboons up here, but neither man nor corpse is afraid. Stag’s motto is: “Too drunk to fear.”

The moon is a white construction paper cutout, the sky and night stars colored with crayon-chalks, which made God’s fingers all dust-gritty from the smudging and trying to color between the lines. When God fails to color properly and misses a tiny space, we call it a ghost.

Beginning colorists, such as kindergarten students, always finish a picture with many ghosts unaccounted for, but the mistakes are pardoned because they are only five-year-olds and aren’t even old enough to buy beer.

Sometimes five-year-olds will go back to their creation and fill the ghosts in with color, and the picture will be fine. But when God creates ghosts while coloring the world, it’s not so easy to correct them. They have to be filled in with the souls of people who have recently died. These poor souls are condemned to Earth forever. Instead of going to Heaven, they have to stay here and cover up God’s mistakes.

Neither Stag nor Gin believe in Heaven. They believe in a place called Punk Land, which is kind of like an amusement park but people can punch each other bloody and none of the security guards seem to care. It is supposed to be a gladful place to live, like Heaven, but only for punks.

Since the punk style of person would not be happy (nor welcome) in Heaven — being surrounded by white colors and angels and God and very nice people — he is sent to Punk Land, where he can be punk and talk about punk and listen to nothing but punk rock all day long in a totally anarchist society.

Stag is still very drunk. He is swerving widely about the road, singing an Irish drinking song called All For Mr. Grog.

I once knew a man named Mr. Grog. He lived next to my ex-parents and would buy me alcohol when I was underage. He always told me that the world is just a boring place made for rich conservative old men and there’s no reason to try to succeed in it unless you’re one of them. Best to just get drunk, try to be happy, and screw lots of married women.

Last year, old Mr. Grog was arrested for selling heroin to an twelve-year-old. At that point, he didn’t have any emotions left in him at all. When the judge asked for his plea, all he did was stare at his wall and shrug.

The autocar starts faster-faster as Stag’s foot goes heavy with intoxicated weight on the gas pedal. Faster-faster. Soon it is wind -fast, and since the wind sees the autocar as competition, they begin a race. Autocar vs. the wind, getting me confused to which is which. And they both go faster-faster-faster… Stag thinking he can actually beat the wind.

Stag has drunken reflexes and doesn’t make the sharp turn at the bottom of the sideling sludge hill. Going full speed on a grass field, out of command, drunk-fast.

He’s also blinded by a sharp orange light similar to a lightning flare, coming out of nowhere and electrocuting the horizon. Bright like an atomic explosion, but then gone in an instant.

Then I see the difference between the wind and an autocar. The wind can hit a tree, shift around it, and then keep going, but an autocar becomes crumpled to a wreck. And that’s what happens here.

Both of the characters are tossed from the car, through the unforgiving windshield. Stag’s face attempts oral sex with the tree’s trunk, but since the tree is not attracted to Stag it breaks his skull indoors, and Gin’s neck cracks on a large branch as he flies face-leading into the grass field, with dirt and a bug tasting into his mouth.

And as the wind passes, there is silence.

However, neither of the two drunkards actually died, because right before the autocar made contact with the tree, something supernatural happened. There was that blinding flash, the sharp orange light similar to a lightning flare.

Richard Stein said that sometimes a god will give his people a message, or sign, to alert them of something he has done wrong. The sign can be a lightning flare, frogs raining from the sky, a long extinct animal found in a public place, or the ocean turning to fire. If one of these four things happen, it is safe to say that God is trying to communicate.

What God was trying to tell the world’s people with this lightning flare is that Heaven is full and there’s no room for any more souls, so He’s made the decision to discontinue the performance of dying to save His home from overpopulation.

Meaning: death doesn’t exist and everyone is immortal, including Stag and Gin who would’ve been dead if this had been yesterday or even minutes prior.

Now Gin’s face is in the dirt, tasting some soil and a bug who is tasting him back. His heart is no longer beating; he thinks he is dead. He can’t feel any of the physical pain that he should be feeling. His thoughts spark-flicker through his eyes and he can feel them moving about inside of there. It seems the only body part that still has nerves is his left eye. Extremely sensitive, the eye even hurts once his thoughts become nervous, stabbing through his brain to the eye as they panic.

And the only thing he can hear is the silence. Growing so loudly, it hurts.

My vision shifts into Vodka’s autocar:

I find my corpse alone, sleeping there. All of the car doors are open, letting the lifeless kind of air get a hold of my shivering nerves, tottering breaths.

Hesitating the cold, I don’t enter my body right soon. I just stare at it (me) and explore the flesh. It is without color or muscle, just bags of grease-goo hanging from the nerves. My facial skin is tight to the bone; I am sick-ugly, healthless. The God’s Eyes go closer into me, to within an inch of my face.

My eyelids jerk.

It is strange how nobody ever sees their own eyelids jerk. People go through their whole lives living with jerking eyelids but never get a chance to really see them jerking. It’s only common for someone else to see your eyelids do this. Even when looking in the mirror, there’s no way, because eyelids only jerk when they are closed, and not a single person out there can see with closed eyelids. Well, I am seeing this performance now, but I don’t actually consider myself a single person out there, so I don’t count.

It’s interesting to see your own eyelids jerk, I tell you, because they are jerking in response to certain thoughts — thoughts that bring out emotions powerful enough to twitch-jerk the lids. And usually when you watch this happen to yourself, the emotional thought hits you twice as hard and makes your entire being twitch-jerk. But this time my entire being did not jerk, which means I’m becoming alien to my emotional thoughts. I think this is a bad thing.

I look again and find that my complete body is hardly familiar to me, almost a stranger. So many years of neglect that I’ve turned sour-soggy and ill without realizing. I can’t bear to go back inside of myself anymore. And the worst part is — I know I have to in order to survive.

This will never change.

After a lot of convincing, I go inside my body — back to the rolling world. I touch my stranger flesh and become sick. Best not to think about it; I’m always too aware of my defects. Better to ignore… Then I get a sick spell from a giant whirlpool-waver on the autocar’s eel-skin interior, so I change to the outside.

I crack my knees to the pavement, cough-cough, choke my vision away… My voice croaks… a short groan… Then I relax. Relaxation is the key. The spell sifts to a mild swirl, all pacific inside.

I am at a gas station, the gas hose still inside of the gas tank, glunking-glunking it full. The emergency lights are going blink, questioning their purpose. And their purpose, of course, is to make you ask it questions.

“Where did everyone go?” I ask the emergency lights.

The lights say, “Blink-blink, blink-blink.”

Then I notice the whole gas station is empty. The lights are all gone. Only the bright flickers above the gas pumps and the lights that say “Please pay inside” brighten my walk, but it is dark inside the store, nobody there, and all the surrounding buildings are dark and empty too. The street lights also seem to be burned out. It’s like the whole town is saying, “Sorry, we’re out of service.”

Coldly silent.

The silence is muscular. It is a force that has eaten away all forms of sound, excluding my breath, my footsteps, and the blinkers. Like Mr. Death is creeping, stalking me. All signs of life have been taken away as well, stored inside of Earth’s closet beneath the surface, and the dusty emptiness that is usually in Earth’s closet is here with me now, along with plenty of closet skeletons.

Silence is the first stage of slipping into oblivion, objects just stop making sounds for you. Here are the other four stages: nothing will be smelled or tasted, nothing will be felt, nothing will be seen, and nothing will be thought.

Richard Stein said that oblivion is the worst possible thing that can happen to an individual, worse than going to hell. He said there is little difference between reincarnation and oblivion because in both cases you lose all your memories, and it’s better to go into damnation and keep those memories than have them forgotten permanently.

He also goes on to say that Alzheimer’s is the worst possible disease you can get since it erases all of your memories, which do not return even after you die. People that go into oblivion are usually the people that have a bad case of Alzheimer’s. So, word of advice: if you know you’re going to have this disease in the future, it’s a good idea to kill yourself now, before it comes. Sure you’ll go to hell for committing self-murder, but it’s better than nothing.

I feel the oblivion all around me. Maybe it has taken my friends and all of the other people in the town to it’s home — to nowhere. And it has forgotten all about me. Lucky me, all alone in an empty world with no sound, with a spin-wheeling picture.

It’s so cold now. There’s no wind but it’s still freezing, even for New Canada. My teeth start chattering. It scares me at first. I’m not used to having my teeth chatter in me. Maybe they are trying to communicate, to tell me there is something wrong with this place and to leave immediately.

“CHATTER, CHATTER, CHATTER,” my teeth scream at me. But I don’t seem to leave.

I begin to look for my friends.

All the nearby streets are closets. I do not take them. The buildings behind the gas station look more admitting: a slight light shining from that direction. Once I go, I see all but one of the windows are darkened, still silent. An alley of vacant crabwebs and pallid scraps of plastic dolls.

The only lit building looks like this:

A wood shack structure with one window and one door. It has no sound coming out of it, but there is a dull light. The structure blends in with all the alley garbage. It is moist from rain, malodorous, stodgy. There is a sign that comments, Humphrey’s Pub, looks to be made from the aluminum of beer cans and black house paint.

I enter to a small room made for no more than ten sitting or eighteen standing. There are four people inside of here, but it still seems as lifeless as the outside. They are bundled up in snow clothes, seem to be Russian. One man is a waxy-faced bartender, polishing his beer steins, and the others are on stools, nodding at their drinks. The only noise they make is a tipping of their mugs.

I pause, waiting for a response to my presence.

No response.

“Has anyone seen three men?” My voice echoes over the silence. The sound seems stale.

Nobody answers.

“One pirate-like Asian, one in a suit, and one vampire-looking wannabe German?”

Nobody even turns around.

“I’m talking here.”

Nothing.

Patience…

Then I get an answer:

One of the customers speaks without turning to me. His words slip out from under a bushy handlebar mustache, whisper softer than the breath that carries them. “We heard you. Nobody’s seen anyone here. Nobody ever sees anyone here.” His voice has no sensation.

Another one, an old man, whispers, “You should be quiet. Nobody talks here.”

“Why doesn’t anyone talk here?” I crusty-ask without whispering. I’ve always been annoyed by whisperers.

“Nobody ever talks in Silence,” the third one answers.

My eyes curl about. The bar rolls in my vision.

The bartender remains silent.

I don’t understand them. I say, “I don’t understand you.”

“You’re inside of the Silence,” he says. “The Silence has eaten you away from your friends and put you in her belly. You are not dead, however. And you will not be dead for as long as you keep quiet. If she doesn’t hear any noise inside of her belly, she will think there is no food. She will figure you are part of her and forget about you. Otherwise, she will digest your meat and you’ll be excreted as part of the wind.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “I go to this gas station all the time. And it has never been quiet here before.”

“What gas station?” one asks.

“The one outside. You’re all cracked on dippy bobs, aren’t you?”

“I’ve never heard of your gas station, nor dippy bobs,” another says.

“All of you, be quiet,” whispers the bartender, cop voice.

“You can see the back of it from outside the window,” I say.

I try peaking through the window but I see blackness; the glass doesn’t seem transparent. Huff-frustrated, I open the door and point to the station’s backside.

“See,” I say, still pointing.

None of them speak. They ignore me.

“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:

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.

“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.”