Satan Burger (3 page)

"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. T
is 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."