The God of Mayhem leaned in closer and almost whispered, “I like my hands on your bare skin this way. It’s a little more personal, as this kind of thing, well, as it should be. There’s always a kind of… charge, when it’s skin on skin. Much more intimate than a rope, or a chain, or a wire attached to handles.” The man began to struggle, and the God tightened his hands just enough to still him. The man’s eyes kept moving around. The God could tell what he was thinking.
“No, no you can’t get away. I’m too strong. Whatever fantasies you might have about getting away from me are lies. Your imagination, you should have learned to control it better. Your complaints about what we have lost from our past are quite accurate, but that is past—all that you can do now is imagine it—it is no longer real. Now we are in this world—that other is lost forever. It will not return.” He tightened his hands a bit—the man went rigid with fear.
“We always imagine we can have things we cannot have, be things we cannot be. That is the human tragedy. Our imagination is both a cruel bastard and a liar.” He squeezed a bit more and tears rolled out of the desperate man’s eyes. “We should be angry about that. We should make some noise.” Tighter still, and the man began to squirm and kick. “We should tear down some walls and kill whoever we can. Heaven or Hell, is there really that much of a difference?
“Listen to me, little man. You are here, now. You have to take care of the problems we have now. Don’t worry about the past, or make assumptions about the future. You have to knuckle down now. Do you think this is all about us, that we’re the only ones hurting? Why, I hear there isn’t even a Brussels anymore!” The God of Mayhem squeezed harder still, and he began to see veins in the man’s face. “And by the way, I found out that rats will eat anything. I mean anything.” The man began to convulse, his hips thrusting up into the air. “But they especially seemed to like the molasses.” He stopped, looked around. “Do you hear that? I swear it sounds like running water.”
But the fellow was done, and the God of Mayhem was exhausted. People did not appreciate the effort required to strangle a human being by hand, the strength, the focus. He had others to kill here, people who were far more deserving to die, but they would have to wait until another evening. It was strangely quiet, except for that vague sound of bubbling underground.
Somewhere down in the dark of the God of Mayhem’s soul, Daniel felt himself losing hope. He’d never been in a scenario that had lasted this long before, or that had been so aggressively consuming.
A flame flickered in the darkness. “A little fire always makes it better.” The boy held the flame closer to his head, illuminating his face.
“Not tonight, boy. I’m too tired.” But the God hesitated. Much to his surprise, Daniel realized the God feared the boy. “I don’t need to set a fire every day.”
The boy laughed. “You are such a liar! Who do you think you’re talking to? I’ve been with you since the beginning!”
The God shook his head as if trying to rid himself of an annoying insect. “There’s too much trash around. Always too much trash.”
“But you’re an expert!” the boy cried. “You can set a fire anywhere you want. You’re the master fireman!”
“Just because I can set it doesn’t mean I can always control its spread or its volume. I could burn down the whole neighborhood, maybe even the whole city.”
“So? And what would be so bad about that?”
The God thought seriously about it. “I don’t believe it’s time.”
“There’s nothing more wonderful than a beautiful fire. What’s that you’re always thinking? There’s a purity in the way it cleanses things? It greatly simplifies a complicated world?”
“It does. It does all that.”
“Then see what I’ve found.”
The boy led the way into the darkness carrying his small torch in front of him. They were in an area of collapsing houses, porches sliding into yards, rubbish piles everywhere. Again the God heard the burble of water. He watched the ground, careful of where he placed his feet. “Is this far? I have things to do. Is any of this occupied?”
“Oh, nobody’s lived here in years. Come on, you have nothing better to do. Do you have your propellant on you?”
“A little, I have a little.” He always carried some in a small bottle in his coat pocket. The boy led him to a place where two tall houses had fallen against each other. A shower of siding and shingles covered the piles of junk which looked to have been layering the yards for many years. The God of Mayhem wet his lips. A narrow goat path of a trail ran between the houses. Recklessly he followed it until he was standing beneath where the two collapsed houses connected. He raised his arms over his head, suddenly thrilled, giddy. He looked up—he couldn’t see much, but the available moonlight revealed shadowed angles and daggers and spears of collapse, ready to fall and pierce and crush him. It made him breathless with excitement.
Daniel wanted to scream as he looked up into wreckage hanging over them. The scenarios had taken him into dangerous regions before, but this time he was half-convinced that if the God of Mayhem died he might take Daniel with him.
The God pulled out his bottle and dribbled the contents onto the rubbish on both sides of the pathway, now and then climbing onto the piles in the yards and wetting certain areas. He did it all quickly, at a jog, but he had a pattern in mind, a complex design. Once that pattern was laid down, he ran back around lighting it, activating his scheme as the boy cheered. He wasn’t sure if he’d used the boy’s torch or his own lighter, but in either case it worked, everything started, and over the next couple of hours the fiery forms evolved, and like a machine the fire rose and proceeded to dance with grace and nuanced expression.
The boy jumped and shouted, at times his excitement rising into a hysterical screech. The flames climbed into two swirling, ambitious towers, and then the towers descended, the houses enveloped in hot streamers of crimson, yellow, and blue, the streamers combining and recombining, and between recombinations pockets and tunnels of the deepest black opening up the God was eager to see through to their ends, but they closed much too quickly, and the great shutters of heat drove the tears out of his eyes. Daniel could not deny the raw power of it—the destruction was so fast and devastating that the excitement racing through his body far outpaced any coherent emotional response. The God began to giggle like a brain-damaged ape, and then hysteria swallowed both the God and Daniel.
The fire burned another hour or so. As the geometry of the night dissolved into burning color, trailing smoke, and invisible waves of heat, the God of Mayhem felt calmed and quieted for the first time in weeks. He walked away from there, slowly picking up speed toward morning and home.
Even this early the garbage pickers were out in force, picking up bits, tossing bits away, trading and arguing. Some of them had turned their faces into masks by pasting odd pieces of plastic and other materials onto their skin. This made the scavengers look like burn victims, or atomic bomb survivors. He found them an annoyance, and over the years had killed one or two, but not lately. They weren’t worth the trouble.