The early shift — Gin, Nan, and Vodka — is still here. Leeching at a BIG rounding table with Satan, drinking storm-warnings and eating beer chips. Apparently they’re not interested in going home for the night. Instead, they want to get drunk-happy and be party maniacs all tonight inside of the Satan Burger, while the rest of us work.
But, since I am nothing, I don’t care to mind them now. Mort, on the other hand, complains, as usual, about the usual. If he isn’t making fun, nobody should be making fun. But I don’t blame Mortician for his bitchy attitude; it’s in his character to act that way. Without his bitching, he would be as boring as the rest of the world.
Mort hammers at some syrup ants who have invaded his kitchen. Syrup ants are a very pesky type of ant. They are BIG like fingers and have large butts filled with syrup. In the world they came from, people would squeeze the syrup from their butts and put a collection into bottles. On the label of these bottles would be the words: “Syrup Ant Syrup,” with a BIG cartoon syrup ant smiling away as his syrup-butt poops on a stack of pancakes. However, on their planet, pancakes are made from sawdust, because flour doesn’t exist there, not to mention that wood is one of their four basic food groups instead of breads and cereal.
As he hits them, their butts explode and a pool of syrup occurs, getting his counter goo-sticky. Tiny drops of the sweet juice slop onto his wrist skin, pasting the hairs together. And nothing frustrates Mort more than having pasty wrist hairs.
Mortician decides there isn’t time to bother with the ants and sends a demon stapler and a demon meat cleaver after them. These objects have never eaten syrup ants before, but they are willing to try anything with syrup in its butt. At first, the demons chomp at the air, spinning in circles, unsure how to work their invisible legs. Once they learn the how to move, however, they gobble up the pests no problem. Exploding the ants in their metal jaws, leaves the counter a gooey mess. Mort continues his working and bitching.
I come out of oblivion and hear this:
“WHAT THE HELL DID YOU TOUCH HIS PENIS FOR?”
I see Nan in an argument with Satan. In my rolling vision: three stretched figures like radio wax, melting into each other with their screams at each other. There are three distinct voices: Satan’s is calm, Gin’s is a choking cry, and Nan’s is a hysteric shriek, like a mother whose seen her child ruined.
“I didn’t touch it,” Satan replies, shaking his head childishly.
Nan unzips and drops Gin’s pants to reveal a dancing worm, “Then how the hell did it come alive?” she says. The worm wiggles excitedly. Its mouth has developed from Gin’s pisshole and Gin’s bladder is now its stomach sack, two small eyes on the sides of its head, quite like a snake’s.
“I’m sorry,” Satan says. “I couldn’t help myself. You know, it’s not easy being the only gay person left. I have urges that are hard to resist.”
“Well, you better resist,” Nan argues. “Gin is mine. And he’s not like you. Only I can touch him in that way. Why can’t you stop touching him? You’re turning him into a freak. Why can’t you leave him alone?”
“I didn’t think he’d mind,” Satan says.
Nan seems more upset by the situation than Gin, shouting and mewling like it’s her penis and not Gin’s. Actually, that’s basically the truth. Gin and all his parts are Nan’s personal property, somewhat like a slave’s parts would be. When Gin is looking shabby or unclean, Nan will order him to shower and put on fresh clothing. Until now, I never realized that she had complete control over him. I always thought Gin was a free-spirited guy who refused to be held down. But things are clearing. I don’t know if Gin has become this way recently, just after his death, or if he’s always been like this and I just never realized it. Maybe he’s losing soul, losing his will to resist her commands. If I was in his shoes, I would give up hope altogether. Maybe I’d even embrace oblivion — the real oblivion.
“What the hell am I supposed to do with a living penis?” Nan says, shaking Gin’s penis around. “It’s not going to work right. I need a real penis, not a snake attached to Gin’s body.”
Satan doesn’t seem to care. He says, “I don’t care.”
“You better care!” Nan yells. “You keep touching and touching and touching but you don’t take responsibility for the things you make alive. You better figure out a way to put him back to normal.”
Satan shrivels his lips. “There’s a person who can lift a demon spirit out of an object. But I haven’t spoken to him in years.”
Satan goes on to talk about his twin brother. He is supposed to look exactly like Satan, but his complexion is pale and he’s not a homosexual. And just like Satan, his touch is magical. But instead of a touch that makes things alive, his touch makes things dead.
He has the touch of death.
And the man’s name is Death.
Satan and Death were both created to perform specific jobs in the world. Death’s job is to touch people when they are supposed to die, making up some ridiculous cause for each death. Sometimes he touches people to give them a heart attack, sometimes a car accident, sometimes a bullet in the head; it all depends on what seems reasonable to Death at the time. Sometimes Death screws up and gives a little girl a heart attack, or once he had a young mountain climber who was falling to his death die of natural causes. One of the world supervisors (those angels in blue suits, red ties) got on top of Death’s case for that one, and suspended him for three months. During the three months that Death wasn’t working, nobody died.
Satan’s job is to collect and separate the souls from the people that Death touches. He puts them into two groups: good and evil. The good souls are the ones that the rest of the universe can use, so they’re sent to heaven to be processed. The evil souls are either recycled and used for soul-fueled machines like the walm, or Satan keeps them in hell.
Satan and Death haven’t spoken to each other in years. They never really got along. Death thinks that homosexuality is unacceptable. So unacceptable that he created a disease called AIDS to make men think twice before having sex with other men. Death was almost suspended again; once his supervisor found out that he was being discriminatory on the job. But there were people that needed to be killed, so Death only got a decrease in pay. And to make things right, Death had to make the AIDS virus just as common in straight sexual relations as it was in gays.
“Death has no prejudice,” was once a very popular catch phrase, but it was obviously written by a man who had never shared company with Mr. Death.
The catch phrase was meant to scare people away from dying. It didn’t work. People were still becoming dead.
“So your brother can make him normal?” Nan asks Satan.
“I don’t know. I don’t speak to him anymore,” Satan replies.
Christian decides to make a fort underneath one of the tables. He can’t work ten minutes without taking a twenty minute break. The engineers that made Christian did not take durability into consideration. They just molded and bolted him up in the cheapest way possible and shipped him here. So you can’t really hold Christian accountable for his laziness.
Christian’s fort is designed to prevent industrious people from verbally assaulting him while he relaxes inside of it. The design doesn’t work, though, and unfortunately, he’s too lazy to try and fix it.
Which is why this discussion takes place:
Satan complains to him, “Get back to work. I don’t pay you to sleep and make table forts.”