Satan Burger Read online

  But it isn’t like that all the time. When I’m alone with him, we communicate differently than with a crowd. I speak more and he speaks less, so that it all evens out to a medium speed somehow. Besides the small people in my wall, he is the only person that I enjoy talking to.

  Nobody knows that Christian and I speak differently when we are alone. They say that Leaf is as silent as a leaf, and Christian is as obnoxious as a Christian.

  I don’t remember Christians being obnoxious, but my friends tell me they all were at one point. So they say. There are no more Christians today, at least not the Christ-worshipping kind, and there aren’t any religions either.

  The religions were the first things that everyone became bored with. People stopped praying and going to church, holy water went unblessed, crosses and candles were no longer being purchased. The whole religious phenomenon just vanished, like snap, besides the few who considered their religion’s ways of living too routine to stop.

  Routine is an important word today, because it is the only thing left that makes the world go around.

  The people of Rippington are excluded from this statement, since the walm is the opposite of routine. And the walm brings out odd feelings in the beings that surround it. These feelings are the natural reaction to the foreign energy that fuels the walm, the stuff that makes it go. We call the energy sillygo, but that’s not the scientific term. The name the scientists gave it was the stuff that makes it go, because the scientists didn’t care much to give it a proper scientific name.

  We call it sillygo because it makes you go silly. Nobody knows any more about it than that. Probably because everyone in Rippington went silly, and I’m sure everyone outside of Rippington could care less.

  As for the people that come out of the walm, they could give a pig’s twat about the native Rippingtonians. They are Earth’s new toys, and the only things Child Earth pays attention to these days are the new toys. No longer does he enjoy watching the lives of us outdated action figures as he did with my ancestors. New toys are now higher classed citizens as far as Earth is concerned, even if the old toys have more money and better living arrangements.

  The new people live on the streets in small settlements. Two settlements are nearby the warehouse where I live. One is a medieval tent village by the train tracks. The other is a colony of midgets that dress up like past U.S. presidents. (The word midget, by the way, is no longer an offensive term since no one is offended by anything anymore.)

  I think I’ve seen an Ulysses S. Grant midget once, but I’m not for sure. Grant was the closest president that popped into my head at that time, so I guessed it was him. How many were fat and bearded anyway? Most of the midgets are not very good at impersonating. Maybe they like it that way.

  I am sitting in the warehouse with my cello right now.

  It’s not a very healthy cello. I found it in an abandoned apartment house all crippled and warped. But I’m not a very good cello player, so it all evens out. I like to make scratch-crazy noises on it, defacing it with the bow. I’m very good at this. Getting more and more obnoxious every day. And I am very proud of myself.

  The cello is also the soundtrack to my rolling world vision. Right now, I’m scratching at the strings, creating a sound similar to a saw cutting wood, ogling at a group of steel sculptures, very sharp-spiked and crude, and they roll around like lardy belly dancers.

  The warehouse was once used for producing hundreds of steel sculptures by a female artist known as The Lady of Steel. The works are awe-interesting in my roll-woggy eyes, but none of my roommates appreciate them, spitting candy-phlegm on the ground sometimes. The outside world has probably lost all interest in art by now. Not even the citizens of Rippington care for it. Not even my friends.

  After The Lady of Steel lost all her money, she gave us her warehouse and all of her sculptures. She said she was going to go through the walm to find a less boring place to live in, one with an appreciation for fine art. She was the only person I can think of who wanted to go through that horrible walm door, into another dimension-world.

  I look down at my forearm:

  The arm hairs are fanning without wind, crawling like creeper-weeds, wire-spiders, pulsating soup skin.

  I look to the window: a malformed wave of water, coming to crash over me, the drool of a senile planet. My stomach turns with the wave. My breath vibrating. I can no longer keep up with the rolling world, so my eyes close drunk.

  Whenever my visions get me dizzy from an overdose of movement, I either shut myself off from the outside world or look through my God’s Eyes. I’ve chosen the latter.

  God’s Eyes:

  I go to my best friend, Mr. Christian, looking down at him through the cloud’s chin-hair, as he walks up the train track carrying a steel drum. Christian is wearing a polyester suit; he always wears a polyester suit. We call him a wannabe rude boy, smoking on his cheap cigars. There aren’t any more rude boys. There aren’t any more wannabe rude boys either. The term I am speaking of is a Jamaican slang word for gangster.

  In the sixties, Jamaicans would pretend to be rude boys. They would dress up classy in zoot suits, porkpie hats, cold eyebrows, smooth words. They were influenced by ska music, which often glorified the lifestyles of rude boys and made everyone want to be one. Years later, the same thing happened with rap music. Glorifying gangsters (sometimes spelled/pronounced gangstas ) in music usually creates wannabes.

  Christian does not consider himself a rude boy, and he doesn’t care for the jazz-like music that rude boys listened to. He considers himself punk and wears his suits just to be unusual.

  In other words: UNUSUAL = PUNK.

  Two medieval knights are sword-fighting in Christian’s path, going clink-clink and arr-arr! He doesn’t mind to them, passing by with hardly a flinch when their swords collide. We are accustomed to walking through battles in our front rail yard. It is so common that we don’t care enough to use our dodging skills anymore — too lazy. Charging right through is the quickest way.

  Nobody is afraid of dying these days either.

  “Death isn’t as bad as everyone thinks,” Christian always says. “It’s just one step away from being alive again.”

  He’s believed in reincarnation ever since he was a child. He swears that his little sister was reincarnated into his pet ferret five years after her death. Then his pet ferret was reincarnated into a wolf spider, and then an autocar, and then a rock. It’s always an animal or object, never another person that can say hi, I’m a reincarnation of his sister, so he’s hard to argue against. Nobody believes him, but he’ll punch your face off your head if you tell him he’s wrong.

  Somebody said that Christian was responsible for his sister’s death, leaving her all alone in the kitchen when he was supposed to be watching her. But it was probably his parents’ fault or, more likely, God’s fault.

  When Christian arrives at the warehouse and trips over my corpse, only half a thumb of a cigar left, he yells out my name and I awake inside of my rolling world.

  His face melts out twitchy-fast words: “Figured your punk ass’d be here, always locked away, never doing anything anymore, you look like a pile of dick.”

  He’s right about one thing. I’m always indoors. Everyone calls me agoraphobic, but you’d be too if you had eyes like mine. I pause, continuing with the wood-sawing sounds, staring at the sculpture-dancers.

  I respond, “You’d be too if you had eyes like mine.” It’s my usual response.

  Christian goes to the toilet in the center of the room. We use this toilet for crapping and as a television stand since it is situated in the middle of a room instead of a bathroom. He has to take the television off the seat before he tinkers into the tinker pot.

  “You’re always bummed about that shit, guy,” he spurts. “Get on with your life. If I could trip all day without needing any drugs, I’d be cumming in my pants.”

  He always says that.

  And I always say this:

  “You get
stressed of it quick.” I scratch my shirt that says Brain Disease.

  “Yeah, yeah, always complaining.” Christian grumbles the toilet water down. “Complaining, complaining, whining, complaining.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” I say in a shaky, tiny-girl voice.

  “The usual,” he responds, placing the television back on the toilet seat. “Overwhelmed with boredom.”

  He turns the channels on the TV, most of which seem to be cooking shows and game shows.

  “I think Battlestar Galactica’s going to be on soon,” I say grubulous.

  Christian complies with a squint and corrects the channel, pulling up a milk crate. I hate sitting on milk crates, but they’re our only chairs.

  I continue, “If I had to choose only one show to watch forever… it’d be Battlestar Galactica.”

  I go into my God’s Eyes and wander the room, move around to the back of the television set and watch us as we watch television.

  Behind Christian and my corpse, I see a bald, fat, middle-aged man staring at us through the window, puckering his lips, making perverted expressions.

  “I thought you only liked the theme song, guy,” Christian says. “Nobody seriously likes that stupid show.”

  I am actually offended by this, but nobody shows offense anymore so I don’t make a BIG deal out of it.

  “No, I seriously like it.” The words leave my brain and come out of my corpse in the distance, almost like ventriloquism. “The theme song is good, but I like everything about it. You’re thinking of Hawaii Five-O. That’s the one that has a super Mr. T song, but nobody likes the show.”

  The fat man begins licking the glass in our direction with a fat spongy tongue. He is John, one of the two strangers that live in the back of the warehouse who have no connection to the inside of our home, who we do not speak to, who we collect rent from and don’t like. One of his hands is sweating a palmprint into the window, but I think he has the other one inside his pants. I don’t feel disturbed by him, even though he is jerking off to my own picture. I pretend not to notice.

  But I begin to wonder how many perverted old men have masturbated to my picture in the past. It is quite possible that this performance took place very many times. Before I had God’s Eyes, it could have happened all the time. Like there are perverted old men everywhere, behind tinted glass, in public bathrooms, on balconies or behind holes drilled into walls, watching, masturbating, fantasizing about you. I wonder if anyone else ever thinks about this.

  “I like the Greatest American Hero song the best,” says Christian. He hasn’t seen the perverted man.

  “That’s a groobly one too. We should cover that song at the show tonight.”

  “That’d be killer, guy. I’ll work on it.”

  Battlestar Galactica really is my favorite show. I worship it. There’s something about science-fiction from the seventies that turns me dippy, something about the mixture of disco and futurism and sexy spandex space suits.

  A figure, too fast for my God’s Eyes, passes John from the outside, John still licking the glass, saliva running the dust-window scent up a nostril. The figure enters.

  It is Mort, another roommate. Christian’s best friend besides myself. He’s Japanese but never speaks his birth language. But he still carries the accent with him.

  I enter my natural eyes and we turn to his attention.

  Christian’s greetings: “Mortician, where have you been all day? I thought we were supposed to be playing a show here tonight.”

  “I was getting a new distortion pedal,” Mort replies. “The one we have’s bust, and I looked all over town for one. Eventually, I got one from Lenny.”

  “How good is it?”

  “Not great, but it’ll do, me matey.”

  Mort says me matey because he is obsessed with pirates, or the old-fashioned stereotype of pirates. He always dresses up pirate-like with a skull hat and eye-patch. And he speaks with a mock-pirate accent, which doesn’t work very well since his Japanese accent is so strong. The combination of Japanese and Pirate form a new accent of Mort’s own. It’s difficult to understand him at times, but Christian seems to catch his words clearly.

  Mort turns to me:

  “Arr, did you tell him, Leaf?” he asks me, motioning to Christian. A tremor shoots through my body. I heard him ask me the question, but I can’t come up with an answer.

  “What?” I respond, unsteady.

  “Did you tell him the news?”

  I shrug.

  “Tell me what?” Christian saves me from speaking.

  “We rented out the other room.”

  “Really? T’who?” Christian asks.

  “To Satan,” Mort answers.

  Christian pauses, his eyes bobbing. “There’s a guy nicknamed Satan ?”

  “No, that’s his real name.”

  “Someone named their kid Satan ?”

  “No, it is Satan. The Satan. You know, the devil. And you’re not going to believe this, but he’s a fairy.”

  “A fairy?”

  “You know, a tart, a full-flaming homosexual. And he was even coming onto me. Who’d of thought the Lord of Darkness would be the Queen of Darkness?”

  Christian laughs. “Mortician, you’re the biggest weirdo in the world, guy.”

  I barge in with a soft yell, halfway upset. “I’m trying to watch Battlestar Galactica.”

  “You can’t watch that there tele-rubish. We gotta get the place ready for the bastard show tonight.”

  “I can’t help you,” I say, pointing to my eyes. “I’m disabled.”

  “So am I,” Christian giggle-says. “I’m quadriplegic.”

  Mort explodes at Christian. “Why am I the only person who does anything around here? I’ve been out searching for a damn distortion pedal all day to replace the one that you broke last week, and you’re probably going to break this one again tonight, and you won’t even help me set up the stage!”

  “The last time I helped you, all you did was bitch at my sloppiness. I’ll help if I don’t have to do orders.”

  “Arr, ye glimey bastards! Get the bloody hell out if ye be lazy arses,” Mort whines, turning the television off. “I don’t want you getting in me way.”

  Mortician hates laziness. Maybe it’s a Japanese stereotype, but I think he’s just sick of being around groo-heads all the time. I ignore him, because I have no choice but to be lazy.

  “Fine with me,” Christian says, and we get up to leave.

  “Be back before eight,” Mort hiss-spurts.

  Christian seems happy to get out of work, but now I don’t get to watch Battlestar Galactica.

  And the room turns into a huge churn-wheeling machine as I stand. Thunder-shrieking into the ground and around my face, buzzing — as if I am polluted with bees, my hair honey-eaten. The ground absorbs me as I grossly to the door, rushing billow-rollers inside my head knocking me off balance. This always happens when I stand up from a long sit.

  John is still licking the glass at Mort as we pass the window. I would tell him to go away, but I’ve forgotten how to talk.

  Scene 3

  The Effects of Sillygo

  They have put shaggy carpeting down on the sidewalks, so now I can walk barefoot up the way, gleaming at caterpillar-kaleidoscope, squishy the fibers between my toes. I cough and put some phlegm onto the shag, cold on my heel when I massage it between threads.

  Christian does not take off his shoes. I don’t mean just at this particular time. I mean he never takes off his shoes. I’ve known him for seven years and not for a second did I ever catch him without something on his feet, whether it be socks, boots, animal skins, plastic bags, towels, bandages, or small boxes. I’m thinking he has some deformity on his feet that he refuses to show anyone, or maybe he just hates going without shoes like the skin is too sensitive for the ground, or maybe he feels naked with bare feet. Personally, I find shoes to be crude customers and try to wear them as seldom as possible. That’s why I’m glad there is carpeting o
n sidewalks now.

  Christian has been drinking from a bottle of Fool’s Gold — a secondary brand of gold cinnamon schnapps — for the past five minutes. Actually, he has been drinking it every day for the past five years. It contains flakes of gold that dazzle-flutter through the liqueur if shaken, and they continue to dance in your stomach bag after you swallow them. I wonder if the gold flakes are bad for your digestive system.

  I tell him: “I bet your entire stomach is gold-coated by now.”

  He tells me: “You can bet your penis on that one.”

  We head to Baja-Style Mexican Food Stand that is up in the tower shops — which are shops that are stacked and stacked and stacked on top of each other, like the autocars in the autocar junkyard. The shops all lofty and weaky, constructed by amateurs, ready to collapse at any day. Several ladders and splinter-rickety spiral stairs go from shop to shop to shop to shop.

  We go up a ladder for three shops to a ledge, take another ladder through the floor of a sewing store, then through a wood shop, then through a small school for autistic children. The roof of the tower owns the food shops; one food shop being the Mexican burrito store that we always-always eat at. And it’s very surprising that the best Mexican food in the entire world is in Rippington, New Canada.

  Up here, there’s a large cage with a female baboon inside, the baboon squawking and slapping at herself, eye-goobers sliming into her facial fur, sticking. We always eat where we can see the baboon, watching her sit there all miserable and squawking, slapping, rolling in my swirl-vision.