The United States of Air: a Satire that Mocks the War on Terror (23 page)

Stummick lit a fresh cigarette. “Tomorrow is your, how you say? Day of Giving Thanks?”

“That unholy Thursday,” I groused. “What about it?”

Maybe Fatso had something to celebrate at his Thanksgiving banquet this year. I sure didn’t.

“What you do is simple,” Stummick continued. “Go undercover to this feast. Sneak into the kitchen. Poison the soup.
Voilà!
No more mafia.”

A makeup artist and member of
La Résistance
had joined us in the kitchen.

“Tonight you shall be Alberto Caponey Baloney of Chicago,” the man told me, holding up the mask of the ugliest and fattest member of the Food Mafia. Boils sprouting hairs blistered the man’s forehead. A thick scar meandered across one cheek and severed the nose in two.

“But what about the real Baloney?” I asked. “Isn’t he going to be there? Rather awkward if we both show up.”

The makeup artist sighed. “Alberto, I am sorry to say, suffers from high cholesterol.
Si triste, non?
His favorite food is pig dick on a stick, deep-fried in pig fat. A Chicago delicacy. His doctor has been warning him for years to cut down. Sadly, he refuses. It will come as no surprise to anyone when he is found dead due to a heart attack. Naturally, the body won’t be discovered until Saturday or Sunday at the earliest.
La Résistance
will see to that.”

I tried on the fat suit and mask. It itched.

“Whatever you do, don’t scratch,” the makeup artist warned.

“How do I walk? How do I talk? How do I hold myself?” I asked. “I’ve never met Baloney in person.”

“With that I cannot help you,
monsieur.
You will have to, how you say?
Improviser.”

I turned to Stummick. “These are real live human beings we’re talking about,” I said. “Addicts and food terrists, sure. But otherwise people just like me. How can I assassinate hundreds of my fellow creatures?”

Stummick puffed on his Gauloise. “They are guilty, are they not?”

“They are innocent until proven guilty,” I scolded him. “Who am I to take the law into my own hands?”

“You’re the law,” he said. “You’re ATFF. Remember?”

“That’s true,” I said. “I
am
the law.” Although his argument left me unconvinced. “Why don’t I call Cap, then?” I suggested. “Have the fatty wagons ready. We can round them up. Put them in Fat Camp.”

“
Non! Monsieur.”
The spy stubbed out his cigarette. “You must speak of this to no one. Fatso has spies everywhere. Even in your department. One little phone call, and—
poof!
You will never see Fatso again.”

Reluctantly, I agreed to his plan. In the meantime I decided to visit Judge Oscar Meyer-Weiner, ask his advice. I know, I know, Stummick said to tell no one. But if you can’t trust a Food Court judge, who can you trust?

Twenty

The next morning, I slipped into the courtroom and sat in the back—and worried. Had Meyer-Weiner heard about my suspension? What would he say? Would he still be willing to give me the advice I so desperately craved? I chewed my fingernails—and swallowed, cursing myself for my lack of faith—and waited for him to finish with the current defendant, a seventy-eight-year-old food terrist from a nearby nursing home.

“It was just a cracker,” the old woman said, her voice wavering. “I was so hungry. Just a little cracker. That was all.” She looked around the gallery, looking for allies, but found only accusing stares. “Does no one else feel hunger anymore?” she cried out. “Am I the only human being left who remembers what it’s like to eat and feel full?”

“Counsel!” Meyer-Weiner exploded from the bench. “Control your client!”

Her lawyer stood up, an obvious air-eating virtuoso. He stroked his glistening waddle with a manicured thumbnail. “Mrs. Jenkins has been a food terrist all her life, Your Honor,” he said. “At her age it is difficult for her to make the adjustment, to learn the heavenly secrets of atmospheric consumption. As even a short stint in Fat Camp will likely prove fatal, we therefore throw ourselves on the mercy of the court.”

“Understood,” the judge said. He lifted his gavel. “In that case—”

“I do nothing of the sort,” the woman said, her voice rising in a screech. “I eat, and I like to eat, I don’t see anything wrong with eating, and I’m going to keep on eating just as much as I feel like. Or should I say just as much as I can get my hands on these days.”

“French propaganda,” Meyer-Weiner thundered. “You undermine this great nation when you repeat such obvious lies. Think of the damage you to do to our troops, who are fighting and dying in the Global War on Fat to keep this country safe.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, young man,” she said, and wagged a finger at the judge. Meyer-Weiner was in his sixties. “That Prophet of yours, too.” She shook her fist at the portrait of our Divine Leader, a massive oil canvas that hung behind the bench. The artist had rendered him with a halo and wings. “Eat air,” she scoffed. “Next you’ll be telling me to drink gasoline and shit petunias.”

“Madam,” Meyer-Weiner said, and pointed his gavel at her head. “If you do not refrain from this sort of behavior, I will be forced to—”

“I will refrain from nothing!” she shrieked. “It’s about time someone gave you people a piece of her mind. You’re the ones who killed my grandchildren. Jacob six and Andrea eight and Justin three and a bunch of others I can’t remember now. Skeletons! That’s all they were when we buried them. Bits of skin and bone delivered in a pine box from that Fat Camp of yours. And draped in a flag! As if that makes it all better! Well I got nothing left to lose. I’ll scream until the Prophet himself hears me! Let me go!”

The bailiff grabbed her around the waist and lifted her off the ground.

“Guilty,” the judge intoned. Smack of the gavel. “Thirty days. Sixty more for repeating French propaganda. Ninety more for blaspheming the Prophet. Get her out of here.”

“Let go of me!” she hollered, and struggled in the bailiff’s arms. Her lawyer followed her out, pushing his client’s walker ahead of him, his jaws chewing on something almost imperceptibly.

“Next case!”

I stood up. “May it please the Food Court.”

Meyer-Weiner squinted into the gallery. “Special Agent Frolick!” he said. He waved his gavel at the crowd, and gestured at me. “A true Airitarian hero. What brings you before the seat of blind lady justice?”

Oh thank the Prophet. He hadn’t heard about my suspension after all. Still, I was reluctant to speak freely in front of so many people.

“Perhaps a fifteen-minute recess would be welcome by the court?”

The judge nodded. “Fifteen minutes.” He banged his gavel and swung down off the bench. I followed him into chambers.

I’d known Meyer-Weiner since my days on the D.C. force. Back then the press had dubbed him Judge Hang M. High, or Hangnail for short. He liked the nickname so much he asked all his friends to call him that.

Together we’d sent thousands of marijuana users to prison for life. “Half a joint?” Hangnail used to say. “Let ’em get ass-raped for the rest of their lives and die of AIDS. They deserve no better.”

“Now, now, Hangnail,” I’d scold him, over a late night all-you-can-eat buffet, plates piled so high we could no longer see each other. “I find it hard to believe that the other prisoners would ever do such a thing.”

“Nothing like a good back door gangbang to teach a man the true meaning of justice,” he would grunt, and sneak outside to smoke a funny-smelling cigarette.

Our late-night buffets ended when the Prophet came to power and revealed the far greater menace lurking in our midst—food itself. Meyer-Weiner had the highest conviction rate of any Food Court in the country. What was even more amazing, he was just as obese now as he was when I first met him.

He flopped back into his chair and closed his eyes. “I am so tired of these goddamn food terrists I could puke,” he said. “Is it really so hard not to get caught?”

“And getting harder,” I said with enthusiasm.

He opened one eye. “That’s the spirit. Pretend you’re still on the bandwagon.”

I puzzled over this. “What band? What wagon? I don’t even play an instrument.”

The judge chuckled and slapped his knee. “You and me are survivors, Frolick.” He stood up. “Can I offer you some refreshment?”

“Vanilla air, you got it,” I said. “Asparagus if you don’t.”

“You ought to do standup, you know that?” He opened a wall safe and took down a plate. I gazed in horror at what lay there.

“Hangnail!” I exclaimed. “Where in the name of the Prophet did you get that?”

The judge held up a knife. “I’ll cut, you pick.” He winked. “Sound fair?”

A small chocolate doughnut gazed up at me like the Eye of Lucifer. I struggled to my feet. “Are you offering me an addictive caloric substance?” I lowered my voice. “Here? At Food Court? In judge’s chambers?”

“There’s no need to whisper,” he said, and took a massive bite of the doughnut. “And you can drop the act. No one can hear us. I locked the door.”

I pointed at the open bathroom door and mouthed the words “Toilet tap.”

He swallowed. “I’m sorry?”

“The NSA has tapped every toilet in the country. Picks up anything within earshot.”

The judge stared at me for a moment, then roared with laughter. “And I thought
I
was paranoid.” He patted me on the shoulder.
“I’m
the one who orders toilet taps installed, my friend. Not the other way around!”

“You don’t believe me?” I asked. I went into the bathroom, rolled up my shirt sleeves and plunged a hand into the toilet bowl.

“Whatcha looking for, my day-old turd?” Hangnail called out from the other room. He cackled and stuffed another bite of doughnut into his mouth.

My arm disappeared into the cold water. My elbow hit bottom. There. It was moving backward, trying to avoid me. But not fast enough. I grabbed its head and pulled.

Inch by inch it emerged from the toilet bowl. Unlike the prototypes I’d seen at the NSA, shimmering and colorful, this one was encrusted in poo. Three feet long and more it came, writhing in my grip until it let go of the plumbing and I stumbled backward against the bathroom wall. From the judge’s chambers came a crash.

Panting, I held the squirming thing in both hands and advanced into the room. A broken plate and a quarter doughnut lay at the judge’s feet.

“My God,” he said. “What is it?”

“Like I was telling you,” I said. “A toilet tap. Now do you believe me?”

At the head of the snake, a small video camera twitched back and forth, looking at the two of us. A bulge like a microphone protruded from its nose.

“Shit! It’s seen me!” The judge wiped chocolate from his lips. “Smash it! Do something!”

He ripped the toilet tap from my hands and swung the snake in the air. The head cracked against the edge of his desk. The mechanical creature contorted in lifelike agony. A second whack, and a third brought a crunching noise of shattered circuitry. The thing went limp in Hangnail’s hands.

“This is all your fault,” he growled at me, shaking the dead snake in my face.

“
My
fault?” I said. “Look at the poo caked to its sides. It’s been watching you for months.”

“It has?” The judge shuddered and cast the snake on the floor.

“Taking videos of your bowel movements,” I said. “It can even read your thoughts.”

“My thoughts! But how?”

“By analyzing your ass lips when you’re on the potty. It’s designed to detect food terrists.”

Hangnail clutched his chest. “Then they know everything!”

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s why they call it Total Poo Awareness. Total Power.”

“But now what do we do?”

My eyes widened. “That’s what I came here to ask you.”

He fumbled in his desk drawer. “Only one thing we can do. Emigrate.”

He pulled out a passport. All passports had been confiscated years ago. I wondered how he had managed to hold on to his.

“We can’t do that!” I wailed. “Then we’d become illegal emigrants!”

“They’re coming for us, Frolick,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of here now.” He looked around wildly and pushed a chair against the door.

“Wait,” I said. “What if there’s another way?”

“Like what?”

I told him all that had happened in the last forty-eight hours, since Green and I arrived to investigate the dead pizza dealer. When I came to Full Stummick’s plan to poison the Food Mafia, the judge whistled.

“So you want to make yourself the new Fatso?” He clapped me on the back. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “The plan is to get rid of supply. Then we’ll finally be free to eat air. And you won’t have to go for treatment for your doughnut addiction. The whole country will be like one giant Fat Camp.”

Hangnail looked at me funny. “You really believe that, don’t you?”

“Of course,” I said. “Don’t you?”

He slumped back into his chair. “Killing the current mafia leadership won’t make any difference,” he said. “Other criminals will take their place. They always do.”

“Not this time, Mister Cynic,” I said, hands on my hips. “You sound just like that French spy, you know that?”

“Oh yeah? How’s that?”

“His crazy theory—try not to laugh—is that if we knock off the mafia, and no one can get food, instead of celebrating, the people will rise up and overthrow the government. Stupid, I know.”

A look of wonderment passed over Hangnail’s face. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “It’s brilliant. Without the mafia, there’ll be major disruptions in supply. For weeks. Maybe months. Then all this bullshit goes away. And I can end this stupid diet I’m on.”

“That’s the spirit!” I exclaimed. “Kick that doughnut habit once and for all, and suck down God’s own air, like the rest of us.” I anointed his scalp with a vial of water from the sacred drinking fountain in the men’s locker room at Fat Camp. I carry one with me at all times to baptize errant sheep who return to the fold. “So what do you think I should do?”

He wiped the water from his forehead and took me by the arm. “We’ve got to get you out of here before they come. You’re this country’s last and only hope, you understand?”