I say, “No, you don’t need to go. I should do this alone.”
I go to Nan on my way down the hill.
“Nan,” I say. “Stay here, okay? We’re going to go through the walm once I get back. I’m going to get us out of this place.”
She’s calm. Well, she’s not as hysterical as she was before. “I’m not leaving Gin,” she says.
It’s a hysterical idea.
“You have to come,” I say.
I sit down next to her and the corpse. All of Gin’s living body parts are cut off and hugging Nan’s lap. There is Breakfast, Battery, Encyclopedia, Selenson, Tofu, Beer Mug, and the Medusa Hairs. I wonder if part of Gin’s soul is inside of his living parts. Did some of it survive? Nan seems to connect to them. She holds the body parts like she would Gin. Her behavior doesn’t frighten herself.
“Nan, please,” I say. “We’ll escape and be free.”
“I want to die,” she says.
“You can’t do that here,” I say. “Come with us and live a life. Eventually, you’ll die and your soul will go somewhere. If you stay here, you’ll never die. And your soul will leave you. You will live for eternity without a soul.”
“I don’t want my soul anymore. Once my soul is gone I won’t be sad anymore. I won’t ever have to deal with my emotions ever again.”
“What about the good emotions? Like love and joy and pleasure and excitement. Don’t you want them?”
“They aren’t all that great. I’ll give them up if it means getting rid of sadness.” Nan pets Breakfast, crab-crying. She’s a little girl again. All of her toughguy features are gone. “I’ve had too many depressing moments in my life. I can’t ever escape sadness and hate. Never. If I go with you through the walm, it will follow me. It has always followed me, going to another world is not even far enough to escape it. I want to stay. I want the walm to rip that sadness right out of me and grind it up inside of that machine. I want sadness to be destroyed. So I’m not going with you. This is my only escape. My only revenge.”
“This is hard for me to say, Nan,” I put my hand against her polite-fleshed shoulder. “But the future of mankind depends on you.”
“Don’t say that,” she growls. She knows what I’m about to say.
“You’re the only woman left. Without you, mankind will go extinct.”
“Let it,” she says.
“Don’t be selfish.”
“Humanity doesn’t deserve saving. And there’s no way I’m going to fuck any of you three.”
“You don’t have to fuck any of us. Someone will jerk off in a cup if you want. We’ll figure it out somehow. Don’t worry about it being me, if that’s what you’re thinking. There’s no way I’d force my shitty genes on anyone.”
“It’s not going to work, Leaf. I don’t want to take part in making a society of inbreeds.”
“It worked with Adam and Eve,” I say. “Plus, it was Jesus’s idea. You, of all people, have to listen to him.”
“I don’t like Jesus anymore. He’s a fat guy. I liked him before because I thought he was the guy in all the paintings. That Jesus is sexy. And even if that Jesus told me to become Eve, I would refuse.”
“I see.”
“I just want to die,” she says.
“Good,” I say. “Then come with us and die there.”
She sits in silence for awhile, thinking, pouting.
Then she says, “Whatever.”
But “Whatever” might mean “I’m sorry, Leaf. I’ll go with you and see what happens. Maybe I’ll change my mind in the future, but we’ll have to see. I just wish I could die.”
“I know, Nan,” I say to myself. “I wish we all could die.”
She’s staring at the ground and holding me with one of her arms. I don’t remember when she put her arm there, or for what reason. I grasp her hand, and squeeze, pretending she is physically familiar to me.
Under the rain’s patting, I hear her say, “I’m already pregnant.”
I’m not surprised. But for some reason, she gives the same response when I tell her, “I am too.”
Scene 22
Horse Mansion
Back to Silence.
It wasn’t difficult to find it boom-sweeping through the streets like the shadow of a thundercloud, sucking up the insane ones into its gut — which was called Humphrey’s Pub back when it was behind the gas station but that doesn’t exist anymore. The pub had to be torn down and replaced with a larger building, since the Silence has been eating so many street people and needed a stomach structure BIG enough to fit them all in. The building that has replaced the pub is the largest building that has ever existed in the universe. It’s called a Sutter.
Sutters are machine-mountains. They’re sky-bathing power plants that are used on planets whose god has been killed by Time. The Sutter is the mechanism that takes over the god’s duties; it’s the autopilot, you might say. It’s not as good as a god, but it works. But a Sutter isn’t capable of performing all of the god’s duties. Nothing can completely take the place of a god because gods are very complex life forms and are easily offended by men who compare them to machines.
But all-in-all, the Sutter can handle the basic god tasks that are important to human beings: creating life, changing Mr. Sun’s batteries every hundred years, dispensing good and evil evenly throughout the world, and bringing souls from death to heaven. Sutters do not have the technology to access heaven, though, so they were designed to summon the souls inside of them into the wing called Heaven Two. The wing is large enough to possess about eight hundred generations of souls before a new one needs to be built.
Heaven Two is not as enjoyable as the original Heaven, but it’s better than oblivion.
A Sutter is powered by the same energy that powers the walm: lifeforce. Lifeforce is the universal fuel. It’s used in the god dimension much more than electricity or gas. But Sutters don’t use humans as their power source. They use the souls of horses. Horses have small organs inside of their brains that have regenerative abilities. These organs — known as Tompets — will rejuvenate any lost soul particles in the horse, making it impossible for horses to lose their souls until they die.
The organ was discovered accidentally by a man named Philip Tompet, who was trying to prove his theory, “Horses are superior to humans,” which was published in a book called, Horses Are Superior To Humans. He wasn’t trying to stress the importance of horses, but rather to demean the idea that mankind is the best meat-form that has ever been pooped into being. Four more books were published under his name that corresponded to his original theory; they were, Dolphins Are Superior To Humans, Polliwogs Are Superior To Humans, and Somebody’s Nose Is Superior To Humans.
After Mr. Tompet presented the Tompet Organ to his world, many people started to agree with him. And after the publication of his fifth book, Venereal Disease Is Superior To Humans, he was killed by the rest of his race, who said to him, “You took that last one just a little too far.”
So each Sutter is chocked full of millions upon millions of horses, and there are four immortal humans — more like machines — who take care of all of the horses and make sure the Sutter is nice and clean. Still, it’s the closest thing they have to a god, so they treat it with respect. If you ask them where they live, they’ll tell you, “In the Horse Mansion,” because it’s a more descriptive name.