“Probably… but hopefully not.”
I leave the conversation and go back to peeping at Christian’s situation. The idea Mort has put into my head is very disturbing and I want to ignore it. I don’t want to be a soulless person, but it’ll be hard to be a slave with a soul, especially if I last forever. But there’s always hope. And hope is what I am counting on.
Christian is really getting wet with this girl. He’s drunk and laughing at/with her, biting on her lip and shoulder. Her stomach is hard with muscle, but she doesn’t seem like the muscular type. More fragile. Christian licks her fragile parts.
Creeper-hands caress to her breasts. The breasts aren’t BIG at all. They’re more like flabby pockets. Almost all races have breasts, no matter how unusual they look. I guess her race is one of the few that don’t.
Since there are no breasts for Christian to feel, he goes into her condom-like skirt and heads for the pubic region, and she reaches into his slacks and heads for his.
The two faces flash with alarm… then disgust…
And the girl’s boyfriend — or maybe he’s her ex-boyfriend — appears behind Christian. Time for a pummeling. I don’t realize what’s going on until I see the male species with very large muscles and large breasts — female breasts — and so I seep into the girl’s underwear to make sure. I find a penis inside.
The gender characteristics are the other way around in this race. The males are the soft pretty things. And the women are the diesel beasts, hard and tough — men with breasts and vaginas.
Both Christian and the girl-male he’s been sexing up begin spitting out each other’s flavor. Christian smacks the boy across his face, grinding his teeth and crazed…
All the people around him are rage-laughing. Music starts up as the power-large woman takes Christian off of her man and throws him into a band of dancing Hogs. And Christian drunk-chuckles at the manly woman, who won’t fight Christian anymore. She knows he is a man, and in her race gentlewomen don’t hit men, no matter how ugly they are.
Christian is slurped into a breaker of dancing Hogs. The hogs wrench him onto their shoulders and flaunt him around the scope. We are the RICH and deserve to get crazy with joy, because we can afford it. Christian, in his dirt-rich suit, gaggles at me. Screaming, “Come on, come on.” And I’m pulled in with Mortician and a bunch of other Hoggians. Into the carousal.
Then the whole pub becomes a fury of movement, with food drippling from Hog chins, drunken women ripping off their clothes and showing off sweaty pale bodies, and everything in the room becomes a crowd of moisture, an orgy without sex. Pure indulgence. The music drive-piercing the ecstasy. Laughing screams. BIG smile across Christian’s face. BIG, BIG smile…
A Hoggian woman with wicked eyes pours some liquor down my corpse’s throat, molesting my stomach while I’m out of my body. I go back to gorge into her, but she’s already gone to the next man. So the body tours into the sweaty food carts that usher the shuffle-prancing mob, with several other Hogs, scoop-pressuring the pies and meats into my mouth. I’m not hungry. I do it for fun. And I gobble so fast that I don’t even enjoy it, but that’s not the point. Then I dunk my face into a bowl of fruit liquor, flogging bubbles. My wetness drizzles inside the liquid.
Next: body twitchings, I throw the cart over and cackle into the Hogs that were eating there. They laugh with me, hopping on the wasted larder — a joyous performance.
And the Hog World dance takes me over again, sweeping my conscience away, away… Drifting with my rolling life, my round-a-go crowd. Spin-happy, Mort and Christian take to the top, pouring me onto a balcony with a round-faced belly woman packaged around me, sinking into my skin like so much butter, warm. I stand whooping with her at my waist, dizzy-balancing, smiling. She’s very pleasurable against my skin, though a half-ugly race for the most part.
Then, up here above the crowd, I stare out whirlpool. Looking on the bacchanal-tingle, on the RICH indulging faces. I smirk.
Beyond the happy crowd, I gleam the outside windows, where hundreds of parasites have gathered, smoldering eyes tearing into me, faces pressed against the glass. Poor, poor, poor. I put an end to my smile and go inside my head. At this time, the parasites have sadness and we have happiness.
If all of us were to agree to let them in they would have some of our happiness, but we would get some of their sadness, and we would all be at the same level of emotion. However, we would be compromising our happiness to end their sadness, which is not appealing to us, even though it is the even thing to do.
After the moment for pitying the poor slips away, I go back to the fun. It was a good, fair idea for me to come up with, but since I’m at the TOP and want to keep my happiness and my luxury, I’m willing to sacrifice the poor ones to the cold.
Richard Stein always said that nobody deserves to live in the cold. But right now, I really don’t seem to care.
Scene 11
Another Day in Oblivion
Today, when I wake up with my brain squishing into the back of my skull — Hog World gave me a nasty hangover, with some sour muscles and a bruise — I decide that I’m inside of oblivion instead of reality. I have said oblivion is the worst place in the world to be, but it is okay when you are only pretending. While you are nothing, there’s not much to worry about. And doing without worry is the best possible thing I can do for myself.
I say:
“I am in nothing.”
This is a very relaxing thing to say. All my nerves trickle right out of me, because nothing has no nerves at all. I wrap my whole corpse in a cocoon of blankets, pressing my skin into a small comfort. Only my face feels the fingering draft.
I decide to sleep like this all day, going in and out of actuality. There is nothing more important than being in a dream world when the conscious world is horrible as it is. Christian comes in and out of my closet/room every half hour to see if I’m up for some ugly fun, but I tell him that I’m having all the fun I need for today.
Christian whines and leaves, back to watching old reruns on the pawnshop television. I don’t need to explain why they only play reruns on television. There hasn’t been a new show for at least three years, which is why I only watch Battlestar Galactica. Christian watches Hart to Hart and The A-Team. Sometimes, while Christian watches The A-team, I wonder if Mr. T is like the rest of the world — boring and emotionless. Christian thinks it isn’t possible for Mr. T to get boring, because Mr. T is a national icon, and should’ve been the messiah instead of Jesus Christ.
I remember that I’m supposed to be in oblivion and not allowed to be consciously aware of the terrible things in the world, such as Mr. T losing his soul. I try to empty my mind. Then I let my eyes put me back into the sleep world again.
Inside of sleep world, I decide I am a butterfly that gets raped by a dragonfly girl in midair. Then a frog slurps us both up and its stomach acids dissolve us as she continues her sexual assault. The dream lasts for about two seconds and then weaves into one where I am five aristocrats eating a sausage.
At work, it isn’t so easy to pretend I am in oblivion. I can’t work the register if I’m nothing, it’s just not possible. I decide that only my mind is in oblivion — only because I have decided that — and my corpse is a mindless zombie that can still perform simple zombie tasks like typing and passing out food. Hopefully, the rolling world doesn’t make me remember I am Leaf, spilling me into the real world, which is where I don’t want to be.