Satan Burger (20 page)

Scene 26

Ten Commandments

           I wait for several moments of time, curled in a ball, soaking in the thick brain sweat of the Movac woman and sometimes rubbing against her fishy leg for erotic purposes, over and over until it becomes droning. 

            I stare up swirly-visioned at the Movac woman, waiting and waiting for her to say something to me.  She has nothing to say.  It stands next to me, protecting the walm from my wandering eyes.  My head-sickness gets too strong when I look out across Punk Land, so much life-chaos of colors, crowds, all around me.  A melting pot far beyond what the United States had been, the melting pot of the universe.  And not one of them seem to be human.

           "Why has this happened to us?"  The words, directed at the building/woman I guess, slip out of me without asking first.  The woman was already glancing at me, knew the precise moment to turn her attention.  She knows much more about me than I do.

           The building/woman answers: "God Hates You."

           My eyes wet with brain juice, little brain people crawling through my hair, sometimes sneezing when one approaches a nostril.

           The Movac woman speaks to me, "God doesn’t want anything to do with you anymore.  He hates you."

           "I’m sure we all know that," I tell her.  "But how can He possibly hate His creation?  That’s like a mother hating her child."

           "Sometimes mothers get sick of their children.  Sometimes they steal all the love out of one child and give it to another, a more desirable child."

           "That makes God superficial, irresponsible.  Maybe even white trash."

           "Gods are not the most open-minded of creatures.  They are ruled by billions of years of tradition.  Tradition closes your mind."

           "Religion closes your mind," I say.  "It creates a very strong view that is one-sided."

           "Closing your mind to religion is no different than the close-mindedness that religions can cause."

           "The God of this planet was not worth the religion."

           "You speak so negatively about God.  You, of all people, should understand Him."

           "Why me
of all people
?"

           "You combined your soul with God."

           My face contorts and before I can ask the Movac to explain, she explains:  "Every once in a while God will merge His soul with a human’s, to see things out of his eyes, think his thoughts, become that person, for a long period of the person’s life.  You were such a person.  And, in a way, you were God.  Or to describe it more accurately, God was you."

           I don’t believe her, and the Movac knows this.

           "God and I are complete opposites," I tell her.

           "You know I am right," says the Movac.

           I decide not to argue.

           "It explains some things," I tell her, gazing over myself and thinking about all of the things that I can do that others can not, all the things I knew that no one else knew. 

           She tells me: "You have been God for as long as your eyes have been distorted.  When God got word that there was a mortal whose vision existed in the rolling world, He had to see it for Himself."

           She sits next to me, rubbing her machine body against me and causing an earthquake for her knee citizens. 

           "You are special, Leaf," she tells me. "God merges with only a small amount of people.  And they are usually only the most righteous of men.  You were the first low-lifer to ever merge with Him."

           "I wouldn’t have chosen me," I mumble.

           "Yes, God regrets it severely," nodding. "When souls merge together, they do not separate very easily.  The process is something that was never meant to be reversed. It was meant for soulmates who wanted to join into one being, to be together forever.

           "When your souls were separated, God took some of your lifeforce and you took some of His."

           So I am still a part of God.

"Everyone is watching you, Leaf," says the Movac.  "Everyone in Heaven.  They can read your thoughts.  They have been writing down all of your thoughts, all of your actions, as you think them, as you do them.

"They wanted to create a record of the last man who merged with God, the man who is right in the middle of the end of the humanity.  Even right now, they are recording the words you hear coming out of my mouth as your brain processes them.  Everyone is in your mind."

Behind me, the walm changes color.  It turns to a color I have never seen before.  Something different than red, blue, yellow, black, white or any of the combinations.  It’s something totally foreign.  My God thoughts tell me it’s called
newa
.

           "The walm is now a doorway to Heaven," says the Movac woman.  "Now that God is a part of you, and you are a part of God, He doesn’t want your soul to perish here on Earth.  He has made room for one more person to join Him in Heaven. Of all the people on this planet, God has chosen to save you."

           My swirling eyes blink hard.

           "I don’t think I can go," I tell her.

           Her face doesn’t change expressions.  Tiny people marching in and out of her eyeballs and nose.

           "I have met a couple people who have been to Heaven and neither of them recommend the place.  Perfection is ugly to me.  I’d rather take my chances in the walm."

           She nods and the walm changes color to a dark blue. 

           "God respects your decision, but it saddens Him to know your soul will be lost."

           "I bet He’s only sad for the part of me that belonged to Him."

The Movac eyes me, stretching her face closer to me, so close I can smell the city inside of her brain.

           "God wants you to leave Earth as soon as possible.  If not to Heaven, then to somewhere else.  Just leave right away."

           "I need to wait for Christian.  We have to all go to the same world.  I made a promise to Jesus that we would keep mankind going."

           "Christian does not want to come here," says the Movac.

           "Where is he?  You know where he is, don’t you?"

           "He is in the trainyard a mile south of here, waiting for his soul to disappear."

           "He was supposed to meet us here.  Why didn’t he come?"

           "He lost interest in survival."

           "Can I get to him in time?"

           "Some soul is still lingering inside of him."

           "What will happen if I try to save him?" I ask the Movac woman.  "Will he make it, or is it useless?  Will I end up losing my soul in the process?"

           "We do not speak the future," she tells me. "Knowledge of the future is only for Movac brains."

           "I might as well try," I mumble to the brain city.  "I have until tomorrow anyway, don’t I?"

           The Movac woman just glazes me with her shiny black eyes, sniffing the cold crowded air, curling a lip to allow some brain citizens to step inside of her mouth and give themselves over to their monstrous female home as protein.

Scene 27

Sick Train

The journey to the trainyard slows my vision.  My thoughts go limp.

I am moving very slowly. 

It’s not a difficult journey through the streets, even though I’m staggering half-mangled.  Not too many people bother to walk anymore; they just sleep in piles along the side of the road.  A few walm people flicker to my left, I think.  My vision scatters so much I’m not sure if they’re real.  I don’t bother to make sure.

Emptiness.

It clots in my head and scabs over all of my fluffy bright-colored emotions.

The horizon line doesn’t seem to make the landscape feel like it goes on forever anymore.  The line is more like an ending.  It shrinks my path, makes it smaller and smaller, until the path is just a dot.  And after the dot, there’s nothing.

Pieces of cars and buildings are curled up in tiny balls next to the street corpses.

I have brain sickness.  I’m drowning.

The train yard. It has less people in it than the street.  The train still moves through its belly.  It never stops.  It never leaves either. The railroad tracks have been reconstructed into a crooked circle, screaming round and round.  It’ll keep screaming round and round forever. 

The train has been diagnosed with a dangerous rusting disease; it can’t touch other machines or they will go to pieces.  The train is quarantined to the rail yard and was told by the rail master that a cure is in its way and to just hold on.  But the rail master is walking up the road without any arms or face.

The sick train paces around the trainyard, shrieking against the track, moving-moving so that it doesn’t break into bits.

Some human passengers are aboard.  They’re speaking casually to one another, waiting patiently to be taken somewhere.  Prisoners of the train, these passengers, but they’re acting like they’re prisoner by choice.

The people are even smiling at each other, and they’re shaking hands every few minutes too, oblivious to the outside world and to the sad-sad train that possesses them. 

Stepping through a patch of steel weeds.

I trip over an overgrown glass bush, crashing it between my corpse and the ground.  My face filets open against the plant shatters.

A watery liquid pours out of my forehead; plastic-clear fluid floats on top of the soil in my face.  I’m coughing up knotty ropes of slime into my arms.

Standing.  Trying to ignore the large wounds in my flesh.  A large section of my body opens up to the piercing gray wind I stagger against.

After stepping a dozen feet I notice the Richard Stein history book has fallen out of my hands.  It’s lying in the crude pile of mucus that leaked out of my body. 

I’ll have to get it later.  No time to backtrack. 

I spot Christian.  He’s a swirling image but I still recognize his rotten suit.  He’s sitting in a junk pile made of shriveled up medical equipment that had never been used.

His lungs are still breathing and the way he scratches his leg indicates he still has emotion enough to become physically irritated.  Or is he scratching out of habit?

"We were waiting for you," I tell Christian.

He doesn’t bother looking up at me.  He’s staring with deep black-filled eyes at an empty bottle of Gold Rush liquor.  Medical ants march in and out of the bottle and gather dry-sticky droplets.

"I guess I couldn’t find my way," Christian tells me.

Standing there in silence and staring out at the hills of clutter-architecture, scrambled up in the red landscape.

The clear fluid drips out of me and runs down my legs. Neither my flesh nor the earth will soak in the fluid, allowing it to jiggle and dance on surfaces.

I’m sitting on a hollow respiration machine with my face in my lap.  

"Why does there
have
to be life after death anyway?" Christian asks me.  "Why can’t there just be death."

"You might as well have killed yourself when you were born," I tell him.  "Why live at all if everything you did will die with you when you die?"

"We live for the present," Christian says.  "The past is always forgotten eventually.  Why try to hold on to it?  When our lives end, and we become the past, we won’t matter anymore."

"You’re suggesting oblivion then," I tell him.  "Oblivion is a very ugly place to go to."

"Oblivion is freedom. It’s like sleep without dreams, without waking up."

"I would love to sleep forever, but I want to dream.  I want to remember."

"To disappear forever is bliss."

"But everything will disappear forever . . ."

"It’ll be like nothing ever was."

"Was there ever anything?"

"I think there was something at some point."

The sun goes down and we are still in the trainyard.

"What will we do?" I ask.

"I don’t care, do you?"

"I’m pregnant," I tell him.

"How did that happen?"

"The blue woman impregnated me with another blue woman.  Maybe I’ll raise it."
            "Maybe you should abort it."

"I think I should go back to my blue woman and start a family with her.  Even though she’s a man."

"And only two years old."

"And a cockroach."

"At least you have something to do. I wish I had something to do . . ."

"You have something to do," I tell him.  "You’re supposed to meet us at the walm."

"I wish there was something else."

"Something else . . ."

"I’m supposed to find my little sister.  I promised myself I’d find out whose body she’s living in now and protect her from the walm creatures."

"My eyes are all dizzy."

Some medieval ones are battling across the train yard.  They’re crashing against the rails and making a lot of noise.

The sick train is dying, coughing slowly along the train track, wheezing.  There are no longer any people inside . . . as if they were digested within its guttering stomach.

The medieval ones slash each other in our direction, near my face and shoulder, battling and splashing against our corpses.

"Maybe we should go back to the walm and find Mortician and Nan," I say to Christian.

"Yeah, let’s go back there."

"Nice fighting," I tell Christian about the medieval ones fighting around us.

"They go on forever . . . don’t they?"

"Forever and ever.  Even when they are surrounded by death."

"So violent."

"The sun is coming up and they’re still fighting."

"The sun is hardly a sun anymore."

It reflects on a large brick wall ahead of me.  A very large brick wall.  I’m not sure if it was there before.  It’s on the path back to the walm.  I must have missed it on my way here.

It’s so large.

How did I overlook that giant obstruction, a hundred feet in the air?

It’s so large.

A sword cuts through Christian’s throat.  Sounds like the ripping open of a papier-mâché donkey, and his severed head plops into his lap, staring back at himself.

"Has that wall always been there?" I ask Christian.

"My head’s fallen off," Christian tells me.

I continue staring at the wall.

"I’m just a head," Christian tells me.

I continue to stare at the wall.

"Why do you keep staring at that wall?" Christian asks.

"I’m trying not to shrug," I tell him.

THE END