Christian says, “Screw off. You don’t pay me at all.”
Satan says, “You won’t get any souls if you don’t work for them.”
“I don’t care. What do I need souls for?”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
“Go to hell.”
“I’m going to fire you.”
“I’m going to kick you out of the warehouse.”
“I’m serious.”
“I’m serious.”
“No, I’m more serious.”
“I’m 150 percent serious.”
“I’m infinity percent serious.”
“I’m going to punch you in the stomach.”
“I’m going to punch me in the stomach too.”
The argument continues but nobody wins.
I take my break from work — and oblivion — outside and decide to smoke another Carlton, pissing out by the dumpster which coughs at me in disgust. For some reason I feel good. My eyes rolling, breathing in the cold air and then some of Carlton’s temperament. Nicey thinkings run wild inside my blood. Sharp emotions. I look up to the clouds — an attractive day, even with life so glummy and sick.
Then I see a storm on the horizon. Headed this way. Blue lightning bolts with curvy rounds, like noodles, and instead of raining water, I see it will rain madness.
The storm will go for eighteen days, not stopping until everything is wet and insane. A blubbery storm. I can smell its odor from here. My eyes open and then close a few times.
In the background, the walm licks its fleshy lips with anticipation, hungry for the force that makes men move.
Scene 12
Pleasure Features
The window still says that dawn is coming. It’s getting very old. It’s been saying that for three days now, nonstop, without saying anything else, like “What’s for breakfast?” or “Look at all the people in the street.”
The window says, “The dawn is coming! The dawn is coming!” But nobody is listening anymore.
I’m still on break, ignoring the windows, pretending to be in oblivion instead of in Satan Burger. Thinking a blank wall, drinking some black caffeine, echoing a tap with my heel.
Ogling a table:
The table flat and square, colorless. It doesn’t breathe very much. Demons can go long periods of time without oxygen, like dolphins, but dolphins are much smarter than this table, so they shouldn’t be compared — especially since dolphins are very prejudiced against tables.
The table gets me thinking about a world that Christian has heard about, where almost everything is cubic.
This cubic world is made out of wood, carved from a branch of a universe tree.
There’s a forest of these trees that lives in the center of the universe. The sole purpose is to grow wood for planet-building. Each tree stretches into the tall of space, dark spider-crawling trees rooted inside planets that are three times larger than Earth’s sun. The trees only need starlight to grow.
Nobody lives in the forest except for the forest creatures and the forest ranger, who guardians the trees from brigands and comets. He inhabits a hut-like creature that lives inside of a dead star, drinking moonshine made from a moon. Besides protecting the forest, he chops branches down for the wood merchant, who comes around every Erdaday.
The wood merchant sells the wood to the world-makers, who carve planets from it and sell the planets to gods. The gods put them into orbits and make the planets alive if they want to. The world-makers don’t always make their worlds out of wood, because wood isn’t very durable and needs to be replaced every three thousand centuries. But it is the quickest and easiest way to make a planet. If I was a world-maker I would only build my planets with wood. That way, gods would need new worlds every three thousand centuries, and I wouldn’t have to worry about going out of business.
One time, a world-maker who liked to create wood worlds decided that he would make a bunch of square planets instead of round ones, trying to be more creative than his competitors. He found only one god interested in owning square planets, and the god filled an entire system with them, not a single one being round.
On one of the planets, the god created people out of cubic shapes to live there. These people ate square food and drank square water in square glasses. And there were square mountains that would get square rain that would drain into square lakes where square fish would swim around and eat square waterbugs then poop them out in square little turds.
And when the square version of Christopher Columbus tried to prove the world was round, he fell off the edge of the planet into the sun.
“Let’s go outside,” Christian says, trying to make the best of our lunch hour.
I agree, even though I should already be done with my break.
Time to end the boredom that work has brought, before our souls go away completely. Satan says that boredom has nothing to do with losing soul, but I don’t believe him. I don’t think the walm will steal a soul from an interesting person filled with life. It prefers easy prey, like my boring parents.
Outside, padding down steps, the Silence seems to have left a warm presence behind, and there is another lifeless calm. The street is empty, but it will soon fill up with new people. Overpopulation is really starting to show in the city — especially around the warehouse — since yesterday’s festival. None of the peoples that attended the festival ever left, so now we have a city full of homeless oblers, aphids, kruuty pods, gobbobops, strik pickies, krellians, hontolos, muckies, turtle nesters…
“Where should we go?” I ask him, as the sky melts like candles and drip-drips onto the empty parking lot’s swirly-thing.
“I’ve got a place.”
Christian smiles and I follow him, up for anything.
We go silently, trying to avoid Silence. The streets remain lifeless-calm the whole way to there. It must have been a BIG feeding today, taking dozens of new ones out of the population and into its belly.
Christian seems to be slinking as we go, only half-excited at the exciting thing he wants to show me. I’m noticing that Christian’s soul is losing him today. Maybe he’s just hungover like me. He isn’t the same as he was yesterday, rowdy at Hog World, but even at Hog World he wasn’t as soul-filled as he was the day before. I can’t tell if the others are losing soul. But it shows with Christian. He was always vigilant and aflame, even hungover, without giving one minute to depression, but now he’s a drone-slinking downer.
And even though I am positive my best friend is dropping his soul, I don’t seem to really care. Am I losing soul too? Or am I just losing concern for other people?
We arrive to The City of Scrap Metal — Christian’s destination. Darker inside than the morning street that we are on. An infesting darkness.
A sign on the gate tells us, “Yard of the Autocars.”
A trillion tons of speckled metal meat stacked in piles of piles, into skyscraper buildings. Half eaten by the rust parasites, all in the sweating dirt yard, where the children live, where automobiles are left to die, left to suffocate.
All the poor autocars…
Living like the dead, every day in a painful festering heap. They can feel every second of time tearing at them, breaking them down to ruins. There’s no gas or oil or passengers for the cars to eat. They are left to cannibalism. They eat the other autocar corpses: cars that are too damaged, cars with broken arms and legs, devoured by the stronger trucks. And the people come everyday to pick at them, stealing pieces of their brains and insides, taking the last of the good parts and leaving them with rotten metal oddities and the rat-infested seats.