The Department of Hate - A Love Story (17 page)

“A
n excellent suggestion my Son. Bragi, are you in?” The God Bragi was enthusiastic             

“Certainly my Lord.”
Odin exclaimed loudly

“Good. Let’s go them.”
The three of them strode off together. The woman – Freya, Goddess of Love and Battle – had been completely ignored in the conversation and was now left just standing there. She was furious. Her face red with rage, she stamped her feet, barking out

“Fucking men! Fucking, fucking men!”

                        ***************

Putting on a sufficiently sweet expression completely out of sync with the heaving rage in her heart Freya set out to find someone to pick up. It didn’t take long. She found an American, a tall handsome man from Texas. She stood before him and pushed her chest forward in a way that emphasised her magnificent breasts. She said to him

“Hey baby, want to fuck me.” They were back in his hotel room only minutes later. The Texan was eager and impatient and tried to wrap his arms around her and kiss her the moment they entered his rooms. Her face was again openly full of rage but the Texan was too obsessed to notice. She pushed him away slightly and then punched him in the stomach so hard that he dropped to his knees gasping for breathe. Ignoring him for a moment, she looked about for some kind of music player. She found a remote control and flicked through some channels before finally finding the right one. Harsh loud rock music flooded the room drowning out any other sound. She went back to the Texan, grabbed him by the back of the head and pulled him back onto his feet. Though still gasping for breathe he made some effort to resist but she was superhumanly strong and his feeble efforts made no difference. She half dragged, half carried him into the bedroom and then on into the adjoining bathroom where she stood in front of a large mirror, still holding him. For the next half hour she smashed his face into the mirror over and over, all the time screaming maniacally.  Fragments of broken glass, covered in blood, scattered about. She screamed harder every time she bashed his head into the mirror

“Fucking men!  God dam, fucking men!”
She’d had enough of them. Whack!  She was just sick to death of them. Whack! With some satisfaction she heard the sound of the front of his skull cracking. She stopped suddenly, not at all finished with him, but he was already dead. She screamed at him

“Useless fucking asshole!”
She flung the body to the floor and looked around – more glass and blood everywhere. She turned and walked out. A wave of her hand and all of the blood on her clothing vanished. All trace of the carnage instantly removed. She was still unhappy. She went out looking for another victim. She found and killed four more in the same way before calming down sufficiently.

When she was walking with her fifth victim, back to his room, she had passed the four philosophers, Jarrod and the others, making their way back to their own hotel room. They were stoned out of their brains and barely capable of standing much less walking. One of them though saw her and her intended victim walking past. It was Robert McDowell. He could see her anger and her very obvious very hostile intent. He looked at the man beside her and started giggling.

“Oh man you are in so much trouble. Run away dude, run away.”
But they walked on by and her victim hadn’t even noticed him - lost as he was in fervid anticipation of lust fulfilled.  He was dead now. Good riddance. She didn’t know where those other bastards were but this wasn’t over - when she met them next she would certainly give them a piece of her mind. Fucking bastards! She turned north, took a few steps and then vanished.

                        ***************

A few hours earlier, after just missing Cassandra, Jarrod and the others had made their way back to Bulldogs. It was crowded now but they came in just as another group left and so managed to get a table. Robert quickly took out another large joint of the legendary Purple Haze, lit it, took a long drag on it and then passed it around. Jarrod sucked on it greedily, craving the anticipated effects of lethargic vacuity. He was feeling greatly disappointed in how the night was turning out – without fully understanding why.  Andy Sullen and Bruce McKenna were still arguing. They were almost too engaged to partake of the joint as it was passed around – but not quite. Andy was staring at Bruce with obvious contempt. Jarrod actually started listening to them. He felt like he needed a distraction. He felt somehow as if he had just lost and lost badly but he didn’t know what. The sense of anticipation he’d felt earlier had gone completely flat. Andy was saying

“When you’re dead you’re dead, that’s it. Your brain decomposes. All of the information is destroyed. You cease to exist. Sorry. That’s the way it is. Universe goes on without you. You think you’re so fucking special, so vastly important that you get to live forever. The universe got along perfectly fine without you for billions of years before you were conceived.”
Bruce seemed to be a bit smug in his reply. This was familiar territory to him he’d heard and rehearsed every position, every argument. He was fatuously patient

“Not live as such. But continue to exist in some form.”
Andy Sullen practically exploded

“How?”
Bruce replied quickly

“I don’t know how, but you think our current materialistic science is the final answer on how it all works.”
Andy sighed, that old line. There really was no use talking to these people. He replied wearily.

“Of course not, but it works well enough.”
Bruce continued urgently

“No it doesn’t. It is fundamentally limited. How do you even begin to explain consciousness?”
Andy didn’t reply. He spent his days writing memos and papers for the AI project trying to explain it away or arguing that it just didn’t matter. He sighed

“What’s wrong with saying ‘don’t know’?”
Bruce was triumphant

“Precisely, don’t know.”
Andy groaned, this one was as slippery as an eel. He tried to say

“Yes, but ... “
. He stopped, exasperated. Jarrod and Robert watched on with growing amusement. The weed was starting to kick in again. Soon they would start laughing at them. Hopefully they would join in. Bruce wouldn’t let it go though

“If our existence was finite, and we ceased to exist at death, it would be an obscenity, a mockery of everything and everyone. No morality, no value, no purpose, no meaning, nothing.”
Now Andy was amused

“Ah the penny drops. You are not arguing from the facts you are imposing a religious constraint, top down so to speak. Admit it.”
Bruce looked back at him sanctimoniously.

“I make no attempt to hide my faith. I am a member of the Anglican Church in Sydney. I have been all my life
.” Andy sneered, another closet Anglican, and he definitely had made some effort until now to avoid mentioning it. He was sceptical

“So doesn’t this somewhat predetermine your views on all of this.”
But Bruce replied

“No. Not at all.”
Andy was feeling increasingly aggressive. The weed wasn’t working properly for him any more. He raged

“So that’s how it is for you lot. Faith. Dogma.
Believe in me. Follow me if you want to live forever. You know they’ve been peddling that crock of shit for six thousand years in one form or another. It works – for them. Power, authority. Status. And when their followers die they never get to complain that they were lied to - because they’re fucking dead.” Bruce was forming his reply and started to speak when Robert McDowell broke in

“Ladies, Ladies, we’re on a break. Stick to the basics for fuck’s sake.”
Jarrod cried out

“Dope.”
Robert added

“Tits and ass.”
Jarrod looked back at him and smiled sweetly

“How is Wendy?”
Robert replied gracefully

“Very well thank you. She’s still mad at you by the way. She thinks you were rude to her back at the Golden Cat.”
Jarrod was surprised, he asserted

“That was five months ago! And I wasn’t
rude at all.” Robert replied

“I know. They’re all fucking insane. You know that.”
The other two were listening, keeping quiet. They saw the sense in putting aside their differences for now. It was an old argument, no one was going to win.  Jarrod looked sympathetically at Robert

“What did she say this time about you coming here with us?”
Robert sighed

“The usual. She and some friends have gon
e off on a hen’s night at DreamBoys.” Bruce asked

“What’s that?”
  Jarrod replied pleasantly

“Male Strippers, big club in Leicester Square.”  He looked back at Robert. “They better not get too close to Wendy.”
Robert answered knowingly

“Definitely, she’ll claw their faces off - or something else.”Jarrod continued playfully

“So, what’s good for the goose ... You gonna get some while you’re here?” Robert sighed again

“Oh no, I couldn’t. Wendy would find out somehow, and then she definitely would cut my balls off. I’m rather attached to them you know even if they don’t get much use.”
They all laughed. They continued to pass the joint around, They were now onto their second since coming back. For a while no one said anything.

Jarrod broke the silence, looking at Robert almost apologetically. He seemed hesitant to speak but finally he started

“You know normally I could not agree more with our esteemed colleague Dr Sullen and have nothing but disdain for the crap that is religion.” He glared at Bruce. “But something happened two weeks ago in Farringdon.”  Robert leaned forward

“Ah, the Black Mass. You have been behaving oddly ever since.” Jarrod still seemed reluctant but he forced himself to go on.

“Yes, well, they were attempting to conjure up Beelzebub. It was a very impressive ceremony and they were all very earnest and, well, a demon
appeared, Beelzebub I presume.“ The others looked back at him – for a moment they were simply astonished. Then they realised that they didn’t believe a word of it. They were trying to anticipate what kind of joke he was building up to. Jarrod continued his revelations. “He was your traditional demon, tall, large, grey skin, red eyes, horns, tail. A text book example. He grabbed a couple of the nearest acolytes, bent them over a table and started fucking them. I don’t know what that was about, maybe they don’t get much down there.” The others sniggered. It wasn’t the effect he intended. He continued slowly. “The really odd thing is that he looked up at me, looked me in the eyes. He obviously recognised me. Then he fled, terrified out of his mind. Everyone else ran off screaming their lungs out. I was left standing there.” He paused for affect. “So fit that in your world view.” They could all see that he was completely serious. Bruce hadn’t known him for very long. He didn’t know what to think and so just looked at him suspiciously. Andy Sullen replied immediately without even bothering to think about it much

“On the basis of overwhelming evidence to the contrary I can only assume that you are mistaken, or simply lying.”
Bruce sneered at him

“Oh, how stunningly original.”
Robert was amused by this puerile exchange. He looked at Jarrod

“Ah it’s not too fair is it? You could get abducted by aliens, taken on a trip into orbit around the Earth and get anally probed by a dozen of them in succession. But you could never tell anyone about it because no on
e is ever going to believe you.“  The others nodded their heads in agreement. Robert pressed on, he was on a roll. “If you try too hard to stick to your story you’ll ended up diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, sectioned and medicated. If you try to point out your stretched and abused anus as obvious evidence for you case they’ll just assume you’ve been shoving a broom up your own ass and getting off on it. They’ll pump you full of Adrogens, T Blockers, Beta Blockers and God knows what else to erase your clearly excessive sex drive and suppress your morbid erotomaniacal fantasies about being sodomised by aliens. Even if when it really comes down to it you did actually enjoy it. You can’t fucking win.”  They’d gone through three joints by now and everyone including Jarrod burst into laughter which just went on and on. They stayed there for several more hours becoming increasingly incoherent. Staggering out of the door at four AM or so Robert managed to take Jarrod aside. Temporarily semi-coherent, more or less, he said

“You know, I’m not dis
missing what you said Laddie. If you really did see a demon, well, God help you.”

When they were stumbling back to their hotel Robert thought he saw Wendy. She was taking a stranger back to her own hotel. She looked very pissed off.  He tried to give the stranger some kind of warning but wasn’t sure what came out. Then they were gone. He thought to himself

‘Poor bastard! Oh well, better him than me.’
He loved Wendy, he loved her desperately – but why did she have to be such a fucking bitch all the time.

In the foyer of their hotel the other three had to wait while Jarrod made a rush for the restroom. The three Australian girls came in – Cassandra, Adrianne and Marianne. They were also stoned and a bit unsteady on their feet. Andy Sullen made a move on Marianne, the one closest to him. She looked very bright, very friendly. He stopped next to her and simply said