He hates perfection.
“What are you going to do?” I ask Jesus, ready to leave. “Are you going to go through the walm like Satan did.”
“Never.”
“Why? You’ll lose your soul if you stay.”
“I have already lost my soul, so it is no use going.”
“What? You seem perfectly fine.”
“That’s because I am Jesus. Jesus is supposed to be filled with love. It is just routine for me to act this way, emotion has nothing to do with it. And also because of routine, I will never leave my people. I am their last protector. Even if I still had soul, and still cared about things, I probably would’ve stayed.”
But then it would’ve been out of love, not routine.
Jesus says, “I need you to do something for me, Leaf.”
I nod.
“I need you to survive.”
I nod again.
“I have been writing a BIG history book.” Jesus pulls out an old-skinned pack. Patting it — a hard drumming. “This is the book of Man, all the events since man’s birth are in it. And it has been handed down and down and down, until it reached me. Man will never die if he is kept in memory. Memory saves people from oblivion. So I need you to get through the walm with this history book, and save it. Then you need to continue writing in it. Write about you and your friends, the society that you start within whichever world you end up in. Breed and build your numbers, see if you can create a human civilization again. Before you die, hand it over to the next generation. And hand it down and down and down. Until there is only one human being left alive.”
“What about the humans we leave here? What is going to happen to them?”
“They have no emotions,” Jesus says. “They are not human beings anymore.”
He places the history book in my lap. Then a hand on my shoulder. “And the very last human alive must bury this history book on a high peak, and the words written on the tombstone must say this.” He draws the words in the dirt:
HERE LIES THE HUMAN RACE.
Scene 21
Flying Fish
I climb the hill to the ruins of Satan Burger and see a flock of flying fish scavenging for scraps of food. The fish aren’t the winged, footed fish-birds that I once saw in the midget president territory. These are normal-looking fish that seem to have confused the air with the water, swimming through the oxygen with their flappers, and getting rained on quite a bit. Maybe the fish confused the air with water because they are insane.
I walk up, up, watching the fish dive down to the Satan Burger rubble to piles of burger-wastes, dead customers, bloody demon corpses. I see Mortician up there. He’s climbing on top of the rubble. He’s probably looking for water, or maybe for his pirate hat, but I don’t say anything to him.
At the flat edge, Christian is relax-sitting on a piece of sign. Smoking a cigarette with comfortable breaths — a pile of cigarette boxes near him taken from the broken cigarette-dispenser demon. I go to him.
The only thing I can hear is the train-roaring wind and Nan’s cries coming through it. I see her once I get to Christian. She’s on top of Gin’s body, wrapped around him, punching him for not working right.
“What’s wrong?” I ask Christian.
“Not much,” he says, shrugging. “Not much.”
“What happened to Gin?”
He looks over at the corpse on the ground. “He’s gone.”
Finishing his cigarette, Christian stands up and looks at Nan. “While Nan was unconscious, after the earthquake took down Satan Burger and knocked her asleep. Gin ate a Satan Burger, right there. He put his nostrils inside of Nan’s mouth while he ate it, and his soul wandered out through his nose holes, just like Satan said, and it was absorbed inside of her. He was gone before Nan woke up. Gone to… oblivion.”
I watch Nan pushing at him, screaming, swirling. Gin’s body parts are still moving, still alive. Breakfast runs around Gin’s face. It smacks him, but the face is soulless tissue.”
“Satan was wrong,” I say. “There are people that will give up their immortal soul and go to oblivion to save another person’s life, even if that person doesn’t love him.”
She loves him now.
“What’re we going to do?” Mortician asks. He jumps down from the rubble toward Christian. “Satan’s gone and he was the only one who could help us.”
“We’re basically fucked,” Christian says, lighting another cigarette, this one a menthol.
“What do you think, Nan?” Mortician yell-asks her. “What do you wanna do?”
It takes her many cries, getting them all out. A gash bleeds down her forehead.
Mort asks her again.
More talking between Mort and Christian. Then she interrupts with her answer: “I want to die ! All what I want to do is die. That’s the only thing I was guaranteed in life, how come I can’t anymore? If only there was an afterlife, any sort of small afterlife, I wish Gin and I could go there. I wish we died last week, when death was working right.” But they pay no attention.
“Give up, Mortician,” Christian says. “You know we’re fucked.”
Mort says, “I know we’re fucked, but our souls are running out. We might as well do something before we’re boring zombies like everyone else. Let’s do something fun.”
“We aren’t fucked yet,” I finally tell them, wondering if they would’ve thought about it themselves. “If we go through the walm, we can find another world. One where we won’t lose our souls.”
“Dumb ass,” Christian says. “Whichever world we end up in will still have a walm in it, and it will still eat our souls. You can’t get to a walmless world by going through the walm.”
“But then we’d be new people,” I argue. “New people don’t lose their souls to the walm here, so I’m positive we’d be fine.”
Christian shakes his head in an I don’t know fashion.
“Let’s do it,” Mort says. “Even if we lose our souls, at least it is something we can do.”
“But how are we going to find the walm?” Christian asks. “We’ve never been there. It’ll take us forever to find it in this city, especially with all these crazy people around.”
“I think there is someone who knows where it is,” I say.
“Yeah? Who’s that?” asks Christian.
“Stag and Lenny.”
“They’re gone,” Christian says. “The Silence took them. Nobody comes back from the Silence.”
I shake-spin my head. “I’m willing to go. I’ve been inside of it twice already. I’ve been inside of its stomach bag, and I have returned. For some reason it will not digest me. I’m probably too disgusting. One of them still has to be alive somewhere inside of it. I’ll find the Silence and get them out.”
“I’ll come too,” Mortician says. “It sounds like fun.”
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 wit
hout 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.
Richard Stein never got to read Horses Are Superior To Humans, but I’m sure he would’ve enjoyed it. He always said that horses are the greatest creatures invented, because they are BIG and strong, yet still beautiful. He said humans can never have beauty when they are BIG and strong, and neither can any other animal, even lions and bears. Unless you’re an artist, that is, because artists usually find all creatures beautiful, especially the ugly or peculiar-looking ones.
He was a BIG man himself. Not extremely defined with muscles, but pretty massive. He found himself disgusting, an ugly beast with pants. He cringed in the mirror every day, just like me. And he found all of his BIG-strong friends disgusting as well, even though they found themselves beautiful, and so did their women.
Richard Stein always envied all of the thin-small people in the world. And all of the thin-small people in the world envied him back, just for not being thin-small.
This Horse Mansion doesn’t work anymore. It was swallowed up by the Silence just yesterday, when it took its morning stroll through the walm and back, leaving a world without their god machine, which means that that world will probably die soon. It has already digested all of the horses inside of it and rendered it a BIG useless building. If it did still work, it would be a perfect solution to our problem. We could’ve gone to Heaven Two instead of oblivion.
Now that I think of it, God could’ve put a Sutter on Earth after Heaven filled up, but I guess he just didn’t care enough to do it.
Of course, even if there was a Sutter, we would’ve had to kill ourselves before the walm took our souls, and that would’ve been a pretty hard thing for us to do. It would’ve been a good backup plan anyway. Especially if there’s something that will try to stop us from going through the walm, like a prowler beast or a gatekeeper, which
is a good possibility.
I was expecting the Sutter to be crowd-stuffed, but I find the opposite when I go in. It’s totally empty. I go inside, my steps echoing, echoing…. I guess all the crazies were too loud and got themselves digested already.
I just used the word praying, but I meant hoping, because praying is a pointless act in this world.
Walking hyper-stretched. Vision sick, lunking through horse-scented spaces. Some people here — walm people. Just a small some. A couple quiet blue women feeding from a wormy teenager. A few scraggly ones and a dark male are here. All of them are in their miserable insides {?}, sitting.
Keeping my mouth shut, I walk on… If I’m wrong about the Silence and it digests me, all of my friends — who happen to be the last real humans left — will become walm fuel. I can’t let that happen. They’re counting on me to be a hero. A hero. A human fuck-up is mankind’s only hope. It scares me. Obscene colors leap into my head. I murder the thought.
After an hour of striding through hallways and finding only twenty-two sad-sad beings, I go to Heaven Two to satisfy my curiosity. If Stag and Lenny aren’t in this area I’ll at least be able to say that I’ve been to heaven.
Inside, I can think of only one descriptive word for heaven: carpet. I’m not sure if I can describe what I mean, but I feel all carpety inside of here. I feel comfortably drugged and released from all stress. The whole panic of the world has slipped right off of my shoulders.
Of course, this isn’t the real heaven. It’s just an imitation of paradise. And the only thing great about it is its comfortable atmosphere. I’m sure that the comfort gets boring after some time. At the moment, though, I am tempted to stay.
I don’t find Stag or Lenny, but one of them finds me.
I hear his voice calling me from a dark section of Heaven Two, where the words Punk Land have been hand written on a carpet wall. It was Stag’s little joke.
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