Satan Burger (12 page)

Scene 12

Pleasure Features

The window still says that dawn is coming. It’s getting very old.  It’s been saying that for three days now, nonstop, without saying anything else, like "What’s for breakfast?" or "Look at all the people in the street."

The window says, "The dawn is coming!  The dawn is coming!"  But nobody is listening anymore. 

           I’m still on break, ignoring the windows, pretending to be in oblivion instead of in Satan Burger.  Thinking a blank wall, drinking some black caffeine, echoing a tap with my heel.

Ogling a table:

The table flat and square, colorless.  It doesn’t breathe very much.  Demons can go long periods of time without oxygen, like dolphins, but dolphins are much smarter than this table, so they shouldn’t be compared - especially since dolphins are very prejudiced against tables.

The table gets me thinking about a world that Christian has heard about, where almost everything is cubic.

This cubic world is made out of wood, carved from a branch of a universe tree.

There’s a forest of these trees that lives in the center of the universe. The sole purpose is to grow wood for planet-building.  Each tree stretches into the tall of space, dark spider-crawling trees rooted inside planets that are three times larger than Earth’s sun.  The trees only need starlight to grow.

Nobody lives in the forest except for the forest creatures and the forest ranger, who guardians the trees from brigands and comets.  He inhabits a hut-like creature that lives inside of a dead star, drinking moonshine made from a moon.  Besides protecting the forest, he chops branches down for the wood merchant, who comes around every Erdaday.

The wood merchant sells the wood to the world-makers, who carve planets from it and sell the planets to gods.  The gods put them into orbits and make the planets alive if they want to.  The world-makers don’t always make their worlds out of wood, because wood isn’t very durable and needs to be replaced every three thousand centuries.  But it is the quickest and easiest way to make a planet.  If I was a world-maker I would
only
build my planets with wood.  That way, gods would need new worlds every three thousand centuries, and I wouldn’t have to worry about going out of business.      

One time, a world-maker who liked to create wood worlds decided that he would make a bunch of square planets instead of round ones, trying to be more creative than his competitors.  He found only one god interested in owning square planets, and the god filled an entire system with them, not a single one being round. 

           On one of the planets, the god created people out of cubic shapes to live there.  These people ate square food and drank square water in square glasses.  And there were square mountains that would get square rain that would drain into square lakes where square fish would swim around and eat square waterbugs then poop them out in square little turds.

And when the square version of Christopher Columbus tried to prove the world was round, he fell off the edge of the planet into the sun.

"Let’s go outside," Christian says, trying to make the best of our lunch hour.

I agree, even though I should already be done with my break.

Time to end the boredom that work has brought, before our souls go away completely.  Satan says that boredom has nothing to do with losing soul, but I don’t believe him.  I don’t think the walm will steal a soul from an interesting person filled with life.  It prefers easy prey, like my boring parents.

Outside, padding down steps, the Silence seems to have left a warm presence behind, and there is another lifeless calm.  The street is empty, but it will soon fill up with new people.  Overpopulation is really starting to show in the city - especially around the warehouse - since yesterday’s festival.  None of the peoples that attended the festival ever left, so now we have a city full of homeless oblers, aphids, kruuty pods, gobbobops, strik pickies, krellians, hontolos, muckies, turtle nesters . . .

"Where should we go?" I ask him, as the sky melts like candles and drip-drips onto the empty parking lot’s swirly-thing.

"I’ve got a place."

Christian smiles and I follow him, up for anything.

We go silently, trying to avoid Silence. The streets remain lifeless-calm the whole way to there.  It must have been a BIG feeding today, taking dozens of new ones out of the population and into its belly.

Christian seems to be slinking as we go, only half-excited at the exciting thing he wants to show me.  I’m noticing that Christian’s soul is losing him today.  Maybe he’s just hungover like me.  He isn’t the same as he was yesterday, rowdy at Hog World, but even at Hog World he wasn’t as soul-filled as he was the day before.  I can’t tell if the others are losing soul.  But it shows with Christian.  He was always vigilant and aflame, even hungover, without giving one minute to depression, but now he’s a drone-slinking downer.

And even though I am positive my best friend is dropping his soul, I don’t seem to really care.  Am
I
losing soul too?  Or am I just losing concern for other people?

We arrive to The City of Scrap Metal - Christian’s destination.  Darker inside than the morning street that we are on.  An infesting darkness.

A sign on the gate tells us, "Yard of the Autocars."

A trillion tons of speckled metal meat stacked in piles of piles, into skyscraper buildings.  Half eaten by the rust parasites, all in the sweating dirt yard, where the children live, where automobiles are left to die, left to suffocate.

All the poor autocars . . .

Living like the dead, every day in a painful festering heap. They can feel every second of time tearing at them, breaking them down to ruins.  There’s no gas or oil or passengers for the cars to eat.  They are left to cannibalism.  They eat the other autocar corpses: cars that are too damaged, cars with broken arms and legs, devoured by the stronger trucks.  And the people come everyday to pick at them, stealing pieces of their brains and insides, taking the last of the good parts and leaving them with rotten metal oddities and the rat-infested seats.

But the poor autocars try to tell themselves that the parts will help other cars, even though their selves will remain in the autocar yard, suffering and dying.

And all the little autocars cry out: "Why can’t they just crush us?"

And the elder autocars answer:  "Don’t worry, eventually they will."

           Richard Stein said that he cried every time he passed an autocar yard.  Now I understand why.  It’s a graveyard for the not-quite-dead.  And all of the metallic body parts whirl me dizzy-sick and disgusted.

           "Why’d you bring me here?" I ask Christian, sick and hunched, drooling in the center of the lanes of Autocar City’s main street.

           But he doesn’t have to answer.  I see her.  It’s the same blue woman I saw at the festival, the one with BIG eyes and deep red hair.  Still naked but not dirty.  As beautiful as a machine.

           She’s coming to get her food.  Two others join the advance.  One is short and very thin, with short hair and large breasts, and the other has straight hair and Asian eyes, breasts perky but small.  

The blue women seem to have the power to lure us to them, melding our minds to theirs, communicating with emotions rather than words.  I find that the short-haired one is the oldest, almost a hundred years.  The others are just children.  One is seven and the other, who is my girl, is only four.  Despite their ages, they all look their twentysomething prime.  The youngest one comes running to us, childishly.

           "I get the first one," Christian says, meaning
my
BIG-eyed blue woman.

           "Fuck you," I tell Christian, very strongly, with all my steel-jagged emotions.  That’s all I need to say to back him away from her.

           I know that the girl is only a four-year-old.  It sickens me if I compare her to a human four-year-old.  But I can’t let it bother me.  They’re from a different world, where sex is as common and no-big-deal as going to the bathroom.  And, strangely, her immaturity makes the attraction stronger.  She is innocence.  Full of life.

           When she arrives to me, all she does is leer into my eyes.  Sucking all of my power into her possession.  If she asked me to go into oblivion right now, I would do it for her.  I would put on chains and be her food slave, a cow in a dairy farm.  Sex slave to a four-year-old.

           She puts out her hand and embraces mine.  A slight smile on her face, childish, biting the corner of her lip in a mechanical way.  Her fire eyebrows curl, and I’m sucked into her BIG pools again.  Swimming in shiny blue-emotions.

           And now I know I’ll actually get to taste a little while of this perfect creature.

           As Christian tries to figure out how to get them back to our warehouse, I notice two small words printed on the blue woman’s stomach.

           They say, "Pleasure Features," with five arrows pointing at her pleasure parts: her mouth, butthole, both breasts, and her vagina.

Scene 13

Frog Crimes

We decided to have lots and lots of greasy sex with the blue women instead of going back to droming work, Mortician probably shitting his pirate pants right now - all of his anger drooling out the back, down his legs.  He won’t forgive us.

I said
lots and lots
of sex, but I didn’t personally get lots and lots.  I only got a little.  The blue woman was so hungry that she shoved my shank inside her and made me cum in less than two minutes.  And one spurt was enough to fill the four-year-old up.  The best two minutes of my grim life probably, but a disappointment afterwards.

Christian, on the other hand, is lasting, getting sexed inside and out and all around his room, grunt-thrashing against the walls, trying to please the two beasts he has with him.  But it’s more like them trying to please themselves.  BIG hunger.  BIG crash-noises and screams.  The blue women can’t really scream, but their mouths can make a whistling sound.  And they make him feel cheap.

           I decide to peak in on them.

God’s Eyes:

           My vision doesn’t come across right once it goes inside.  Too much drum-movement, and a strobing light that Christian bought at a pawnshop four years ago goes pity-pity-pity-pity.  A broken zoo of water creatures attacking a cloud person, shifting around each other for a comfortable screw.  And the screwing works like batter-pulp, water sifting through hairs, going
Mmmmmmmm
. . .

           It all frustrates me.  I go back to my corpse, to my blue woman, who seems very bored and agitated.  She just stares at my self, says nothing, just stares.  Eye-gazing and I am too shy to handle looking back at her, drinking on a cup of brandy.

           Peripheraly, I offer her some of my liquor. "Do you want a drink?"  Then I realize she’s only four.  "Oh, nevermind.  You’re underage."

           I feel like such a pedophiliac.

When the two blue women are done with Christian, they brush off some wetness from their smooth blue skin, curling sight, and then they depart.  Leaving two things behind:  One is my young blue woman, still staring at me without blink; the other is the performance of shutting the door behind them, which exposes us to a large gang of tree frogs, who are in the act of fleeing from something, like criminals.

"Why didn’t
she
leave?" Christian asks, gesturing to the blue woman.

Croaking frogs.

I shrug and he squats down on a milk crate next to me. Half-shaking from his fierce workout, he befriends a freshly lit cigar.

He says, "They’re like cockroaches."

"Who?" I ask.  "The frogs?"

"No, the blue women.  They’re disgusting."

Alarmed, I drink some brandy.  "What . . ."

"Cecil was right.  They’re dirty, disease-ridden whores.  Disgusting."

"I don’t know what you’re talking about," I tell him, upset but not showing any emotion.  "I like my blue woman."

"She’s not leaving."  He looks at her - sitting there, staring at me.  "What are you going to do with her?"

"I don’t know, keep her in my room," I say.

"That’s disgusting."

"Why do you hate them so much?"  I drink.  "They are so innocent."

"That’s why I hate them.  They are
innocent
.  Innocence is disgusting."

"That’s kind of a harsh statement," I say.  "What do you hate about it?"

"I just hate it.  I hate kids, I hate retards, I hate idiots.  Simple minds are boring as hell and I hate being around them.  Innocence is just a nice word for
ignorant
, and I hate the ignorant."

"Stupid people can’t help being stupid," I tell him and take a sip.

"I don’t care.  Stupidity is
evil
."

"Evil?  Calling innocence
evil
is what’s evil."

"Children used to be considered pure evil once -
born
evil - because of their ignorance.  Their parents would have to beat the evil out of them on a daily basis, so that they would not be evil in adulthood.  That’s why children are so cruel to other children and to animals and so on, because man is born from evil.  That’s also why the only adults that are prejudiced and mean are the ignorant ones, who are too stupid to grow out of their childhood attitude."

Christian puffs on his cigar.  The blue woman watching the wheels churn in my brain.

"I don’t get it," I tell him.  "People used to
beat
ignorance out of their children?  Those people sound like the ignorant and evil ones to me."

"If I had kids I’d beat the evil out of them."

"Well, you better not make kids then."

Richard Stein always said that children came from
good
.  Before you are born, you are with God, which is Happiness.  So during the early years of life, children are filled with good spirit and are happy and comfortable.  The older you get, the further away from God you are, and you become
bitter
.  That’s why so many old people are crabby. They’ve lost their memory of the good spirit.

"You know why I think the walm is here?" Christian puffs and gurgles.

I shrug, watching the blue woman smile at me.

"I think that the walm people are prisoners from other worlds, that have been sent here because all their prisons are full.  All the governments in the rest of the universe decided to make one planet the BIG prison planet, so they chose Earth. It makes sense in a way."

"I guess it makes sense," I tell him, but I don’t like it when other people think their ideas are clever.  I believe that my own ideas are clever, so I don’t like me either.

The frogs hopping indoors agree that we are on a prison planet.  They themselves are frog criminals that were convicted of doing frog crimes.  But the frogs are trying to escape imprisonment.  They’re getting out of Rippington, out of Earth.

Richard Stein said that frogs were invented for a special purpose.  They are the containers for dreams and fantasies and ideas.  He said that there is no such thing as creativity/originality and that everything that can possibly be thought up has already been thought up; before time began, every different story existed in every different way.  And every idea is stored in a huge vault near the center of the universe.  So every time you create a song or draw a picture or write a poem, you’re not the true inventor of it, you’re just stealing it from the vault and calling it your own.

Frogs are the beings that disperse ideas to people.  In some worlds, rocks have this job.  In others, caterpillars do it.  Sometimes even a strap-on dildo has the responsibility.  But in this world, frogs are the dispersers.  So there’s no such thing as
originality
.  Sometimes an idea will seem original to a world, because that world has not experienced that idea yet, so it’s called
new
.  But it’s not.  Of course, the word
originality
contains the word
origin
, and origin means something that has already been done . . . my diction must be getting confusing.  What I should say is that nothing will be
fresh
ever again.  All creativity is just musty and stale.

But frogs must disperse fantasy because fantasizing is extremely important to the soul.  It’s a mental block from reality, which is needed at times, like my go-away place.  It is my stress-reliever.  Without fantasy, reality would be hard to stomach.

The frogs see the storm moving in from the distance.  It’s approaching very slowly, which means it will be leaving very slowly.  The frogs are trying to flee, hopefully off the planet.  Of course, if they get off the planet there will be no more imagination left in anyone’s brains.  So hopefully they don’t get away.

Besides the storm, the frogs are fleeing imprisonment for having committed frog crimes.  Frogs break the law when they don’t hand out fantasies.  But it’s not their fault.  The frogs stopped handing them out to the humans of the world, because nobody cared to have them.  Soulless people have no need to meddle with imagination.  So the frogs gave up on all of our world, except for Rippington.  Some people still have souls here.  That is why the town is overrun with frogs.

I finish my brandy and go to shut the door, kicking all the frogs outside.  I’m not at all gentle with them and smear them against the concrete.  I wonder if frogs are judgmental when they give out ideas.  I wonder if my dreams are going to suffer tonight for hurting them.  I wonder if I would be a very imaginative person if I became very nice to frogs.

I shut the door and turn to the blue woman.  She’s still ogling me.  A curious look.  I hope I can feed her before I go to sleep.