Chapter 8: The Planet of Spiritual Criminals

Though refills are free, Olney is rationing his coffee. He gets like this when survival is at hand. He might blow the first ninety dollars of a hundred dollar bill on the finest poverty can buy, but the last ten will be spreadsheeted, plotted and graphed until each penny is assigned a role in extending the lifespan for as long as possible. He's been doing it for years, it's his way.

He swirls the tepid coffee in its cup, hoping to discover some grounds for the future, but no light breaks through the roily surface. It tastes like cardboard or leather, a beverage in great demand by Sino-Tibetan muleteers. Olney B. Goodepa takes a sip and is transported. Thick-chested with the hides and hair of yak, he straddles a rough-cut bench of worn-smooth deodar brought up from the lowlands a century ago, during celebrations confirming the death of the 12th Dalai Lama and his subsequent birth as the 13th. His elbow rests on the table, nostrils blowing out glittering fragments of mind. Snowglare, the only light in this Moon Food of other zones, appears at the window as an unmoving sheet of fulgence. He awaits not coffee but some other infusion, concocted of rancid butter and black roots found only in rarefied valleys, mythical in their remoteness. He is weary from the morning's long haul over Witch's Teat mountain, his voice hoarse from repeated urgings in the lung-busting air, luchee haw-ohhh to his clunk-belled clippity-cloppin' Chinese mule train.

Olney's cigarette, also rationed, is down to a few drags. Even at a nickel, it's a rip off. Into the ashtray it goes, butt, but its effects have already closed down awareness, stunning the clarity of his solipsism to boneless accidie. It's that transparent curtain of chemically treated tobacco again, rung down with the first puff, separating poor Olney from The Other and himself. He's locked securely inside his robot now, a cigarette smoker who loves it. In gratitude, his jaw drops open, his tongue lolls out and his eyes spin like six-pointed nickel-plated jacks.

Despite this handicap, he picks up the newspaper. On his way to the comic section, he decides to scan the classifieds again. There must be something! He skims down columns sensational with concepts like "mature," "self-starter," "bondable," "energetic," "responsible," "go-getter," "experience required," "no experience required," "send résumé."

Ullbayitshay! he exclaims sotto voce (resorting to Pig Latin in honor of that quaint era when getting a job had meaning), these days you gotta write a résumé just to sling esters of fatty acid at Chubby's Chicken-to-go. Hey, here's one wasn't in the morning edition: Unique Opportunity. Drive Ice Cream Truck In South End. Call Shorty Anytime. Olney's intuition steps to the mound, toes the rubber, squints at the job's prospects and fires three curves that break across the inside corner of the plate, whomp-whomp-whomp, right into the catcher's mitt of medieval terror.

--Hey Shorty, what's the wage?

--Wage? Absolute minimum, buddy. We supply da twuck, da gas, an' da Webcaw what plays dem amplified lead-bell nuhs'wy whymes da kids all like.

...w-whomp!

--Hey Shorty, what're the hours?

--Ow-uhs? Ya gets eight solid, six days a week. We inshuh ya too.

...w-w-whomp!

--Hey Shorty, it's a nice neighborhood, huh?

--Nice naybahood? Nuttin' but 'down home' folks deah, snigguh, snigguh. Yeah, one, maybe two've m'boys gets mugged evewy summuh, but dat's nuttin' weguluh.

...w-w-w-whomp!

--Yeah, Shawty. Shu-uh. I can see it weal plain. Hit squads of twelve-yeaw-olds dwove mad fum listenin' ta Mawy Had a Lit'le Lamb at decibel levels callin' fuh moiduh. Milk-addict killuhs aftuh da changuh hangin' fum my t'wift staw pants, an' me, da dwivuh wit' da oily face always needin' a shave, howlin' wit' wage, imp'tent ta stop 'em fum slashin' me wit' busted coke bottles ... and meanwhile, behine doze naybahood coitans, da eyes of da housewives'd be glistenin', an' dat ain't all. Yeah. Fuck off, Shawty.

Olney is jolted out of his rhotacism by the crackle of static electricity coming from Helga's uniform as she pulses by. Helga is resigned to the constant charge, having long ago given up zany Bounce enthusiasms, her jovial petitions lost on the mulish obliquity of Moon Food uniform and towel launderer, eighth uncle Heinrich. Olney catches her on the next loop and orders a refill, rescuing, as she returns, the rashly, though gently, butted cigarette.

§§§

Turning back to the front page, Ice Cream Truck Slaying moirés to a reprise of the grins of Charley Barter, brother of a former LOTHP. So, the good ol' boy's back in the news, is he? Charley's face, lovingly photographed by a devotee of Diane Arbus, grins at Olney, at the world. But just behind the grinning eyes lies a frozen barrens of persona, wherein lurk the inhuman rulers of men; real, dark forces that consume the whippet-brained; themselves, in turn, remote-controlled at random by multiverse robot-bums crunching matter on the way to blackouts in back alleys hidden in the Marble in some kid from Somewhere's back pocket ...

Some two thousand years down the line, Charley's grin is a twisted update on the love of Lord Jesus. Hardly surprising, really. Two thousand years is a long time to remember, especially for a world of gold-digging amnesiacs. Recent resurrections of interest in oriental mystagogy have put off the Masters and Adepts, who long ago fled the scene because of record enrollment: who can teach immortality to someone who is so many rows back he can't even be seen? Correctly reading Kali Yug as the sign of the times, they've left things in the hands of the Gurus and Pulpiteers who don't mind stadium-sized classrooms, dervishes with tits, Jewish Tibetans, drive-in churches, and TV flocks. Oh, they're still around, the really big guys, those fanagogues. Olney's never given up hope that one day he'll turn the right corner and there, lying in wait, will be The Messenger, giggling as he empties a squirt gun in Olney's face.

In the meantime, Charley and the Human Race have been sleeping through all the lessons most important to their salvation, the very essentials themselves. Why, they even forget their own revelations and miracles. One day it's "I saw Christ in my zinnia patch! My life is changed forever." The next: "... er, bring me that head of hyena, Leonina, I wish to eat its brains for clarity. Oh, and while you're up, I'd like to pork one of the children afterward. Prepare the one called Cringe." Lives of inanition. Hierophanies and holocausts leap-frogging each other with all the attention of a hum following ho.

Once in a blue moon Charley might get to thinking about things. "Boy, it sure is strange..." But what is strange never much gets defined. Something just naturally signing off there, as he pads to the kitchen for another Dixie cup of Jack Daniels and a look-see through the TV Guide. "Now what in hell is today and how do I find it in this cotton-pickin' thang?"

Olney was a former cotton picker himself, if only for a day, down near Wasco, the whole day's pay blown that sweating night in a tavern near enough to the freeway he could've made L.A. by dawn if he hadn't passed out behind an overpass in a gulley there. And he never thought things were anything but strange. He had no trouble accepting and passing on the notion that Jesus, like Mr. Death, was an employee of the Department of Stellar Welfare and Species Resources. In the executive capacity, to be sure: no hob-nobbin' with slugs like blue-collar Death for the likes of Him. The Department's motto: "Endure a little pain to save a little strain," had served throughout Time, or at least since the Reconstitution Period following the last Big Bang. No one could remember anything before that, although Those Really On High surmised it had been much the same old thing.

Charley Barter and Olney Garkle were only two among many for whom Jesus had striven so very hard to set An Example. Cynics in the Department relish keeping Him informed of general trends. They're in the canteen now, discussing the latest edition of the Planet X Times~Colonist, published there every century for those in the Service requiring weekly updates. Let's eavesdrop as they chat over coffee and bear claws, Himself in attendance.

"Seems You counted Your chickens before they hatched, Old Boy," says Dornyx Ool, renowned Rummph of All Goozles.

Petagenarian Octofutz Spizzle, Utmost Phlugthuggl in the Great Aaa, agrees. "Yes, I'm afraid they've missed the point down there. Poor things."

"In my humble opinion, Sir, a much better use of Your expertise," begins McXaxthorp of Special IgMomps, "would have been a mission, if You don't mind my saying so, to the Bicycle Beings of Ti-Ra. We're all very fond of them. They've been a grand source of amusement for such a long time, but we're beginning to tire of them, if You'll excuse the pun. An appearance by Yourself--a brief exposition on a more efficaca ... a more efficar ... a less egregious misuse, Sir, of those dratted little pump appendages they keep fumbling with--"

"Oh, indeed," gushes Crzlslsh, Great Thing of Boilz'bup. "The silly dears have been flatting out for simply aeons."

"--as I was saying, Sir, in my humble opinion, we'd do better giving aid to them as those gazooney's on Planet X, Sir."

"But no," exasperates Blagypughs O. Squidroonool, Sawg Eminence from the Fuht Grids. "Sentimental You, with Your wild ideas about the 'exciting possibilities' of heavy-brained bipeds--"

"And just what have they done with those brains?" Crzlslsh demands rhetorically, "They've used them to build the engines of their own destruction. It's absolutely disgusting. Their simply vicious ennui is causing them to hurt themselves and perhaps the entire universe. Can't something be done?" Before anything has a chance to answer, he continues. "The Bikies, on another appendage, don't have such mean problems. Their cute little brains are just large enough to keep them wobbling merrily about their Sunday funnies world. They just exist, one of our silliest species. And they do not have reproductive thingumajigs to drive them crazy, like those bullies on Planet X. That's Your major problem there. All those grotesque cunnies and wee-wees foaming at the mouth every chance they get."

"What's he hollarin'?" ejaculates His Nibs, beanie leaping a foot.

"Yes, that's it," enthuses Jyzhj Foop, from out of Ymaapaloops. "That's pegging the old hole forthwith, Crzlslsh, my boy. I suggest we turn down their dirty little urges. Really, gentlethings, their reproductive organs and pleasure centers are much too strong for their brains. Why, their cognitive processes are positively fouled from the incorrigible desire to release or obtain that dreadful spunkum."

Blagypughs: "To the degree that, long after Your Visitation, their Penitentes, in emulation of Your Love, are to be seen every 'Good Friday' driving nails through their hands, when any ninny knows You were pronged through the wrists, goodness knows, hands being unable to support body weight."

"A scandalous misuse of Department Funds," contributes the MOG.

"I say let us continue to use their organic energy as compost and mulch to better feed life on our many other play-planets, but let's not go on about these 'mystic propensities' You so fondly wish they had," concludes Eminence Squidroonool.

"I've got a bully idea, now don't get mad." It's the Kid, mere gigagenarian Geezits DeHisce, Successive Youqstruhuu. "But what say we send down a couple of minor Asteroids just to see what happens? It'll be grand fun."

"Right. Why save clinchpoops?"

"Hip, hip--"

"Hurrah!"

§§§

Yet, if the human body, with it's uncanny brain, had been properly fitted in the first place, a Charley Barter might have queried the Department on the absurd and arbitrary conditions into which human beings were born. "For cryin' out loud," he would've bellowed, "what's the fuckin' point?" But the Charley Olney's looking at here on page one has never even rippled the surface of his existential pond, beyond basic glances therein--and from a safe distance--for info on how to get more wads of hundred dollar bills.

Still, for all his participation in the foibles of the Sapienate's turkey trot to this afternoon's slot in the universal panorama, Charley was a man to be reckoned with. Though he might be taken for one, Charley Barter was no mere grease jockey in the Georgia outback, the garrulous owner of a moderately successful gas station, with his wife his waitress welded to the adjacent cafe's counter, the two proprietors well thought of by the gaunt, saturnine hunter-gatherers roundabouts. No sir. Charley Barter had power. The kind of power enjoyed by eminent persons-through-association: cheerful, irresponsible and dumb.

Or had had. What on Earth has that old Charley gone and done, now? But Olney cannot bring himself to read the article. Charley's last scrape was a howler, though. Thought he'd been real cool hanging out with the world's Number One Madman (who was playing host at the time to Number Two, a dark little devil on the lam from a nation uprisen). Charley had never dreamed anyone would notice. Why, hell, he was an American, wasn't he? Full of grins and vitamins and a healthy itch in his palm. What the hell was wrong with knockin' down a little jack with the heathens?

Well, Charley ...

He was doing it for his family, he said. A family man was he. All this trouble for a guy just trying to do his patriotic best. And a religious man, to boot. "Don't forget God, fr Chrissakes. Hey, I just love the guy." But now Charley was really sweating. Even the newspaper in Olney's hands was getting damp. TV screens throughout the land grew moist, sustaining rilled salt deposits of fear long after Charley's image had been swept away by the endless flow of unabsorbable events. Everyone was sweating. No one on Earth, past or present, could boast of virtuously dry underarms. Not from Moscow to Kabul, Washington to Managua, Belgrade to Sarajevo, Tel Aviv to Beirut, Beijing to Lhasa, Jakarta to Dili, or Teheran to Baghdad-and-back-again. Like that lucky old sun, Jesus and Co. could roll around heaven all day long, but the rest of us were mortared by an inspissation of impossibly snarled karma that no sense of humor could ever hope to alter.

Needing relief, Olney flips through the paper for the comics. Uh-oh, Dagwood's asking for a raise again. Struck by the indisputable power wielded by Mr. Dithers, Olney wonders if maybe there isn't an Elect after all. An Elect and its Preterite. The Elect ascend unto "heaven," while the Preterite, fall guys to the neverend, continue to act in their supporting roles as God fodder, as energy to be used by the Ones born to inherit the Kingdom.

And politicians are neither. Neither Elect nor Preterite. They are absolutely karma-free.

For crying out loud, you're asking yourself, irritated at the review or friend who suggested this degenerate fictum, just what in the hell is going on here? Indeed, irritation, if not boredom, is threatening your equilibrium after reading all these pages. To the point of braving the looted streets of your late twentieth century city, town or hamlet for a run to the corner store and a pack of those cigarettes you wish you'd never given up. For certainly cancer or death hacking its way out of the night somewhere between your dwelling and the barricaded Korean selling fitness magazines, canned stew and Mars bars would be better than this, this ...

Yes, fact-finding commissions funded by the Psychic Sciences have now proven, with only the shadiest of doubts, that politicians do not, let us repeat, do not carry the, as it were, monkey of karma on their backs.

--And why is this? you ask snappishly.

Well, may I suggest, on behalf of Olney's registered electorate (too unconcerned to vote, sad to say), that it depends on how you fine tune the form replicas.

--Oh? sez you, yawning, with a glance at the tattered Harlequins on the bottom shelf.

Let's retune the world as, say, the Stanley Cup, why don't we.

--Yeah, ok.

There's a helluva match going on. No one knows when it started, and predictions agree that, despite temporary setbacks such as asteroids or nuclear war, it will never end. Thing is, no matter where you plug in, there are just two teams. On the one side, you've got the Pricks of Conscience, fielded by God--that is, the "god" of the local group to which Earth belongs--one, Boyd Hop, on Loan from Central Rextabulia. On the other side, you've got your Maul Majority, coached by wart-nosed demiurge Thugs Bashboy, recruited from the bowels of the Black Hole Belt. Well, in this perdition of many seasons, the Elect are the players for both sides. And the Preterite? They're the pucks, of course. Periodically, riots break out here and there among these unfortunate appurtenances, which only serve to fuse the regional Elect of both sides for a massive squandering of pucks. Beings throughout the Known Whatever are glued to their screens for days at a time, until the festivities peter out to the usual gestures, posturings and, of course, the inevitable outcome.

--Zzzzzz ...

In the course of events, politicians are your real agitators and confusionists. Known in the trade as "anti-Bambi's," in reality they are custom made war toys given the breath of life to exhibit larval belief systems through atavistic exhortations and determined ignorance. Their only endowment is rhetorical turpitude and with it they keep the "pucked of Earth" from realizing their enslavement. An enslavement not so much to "masters," as to the condition itself, where evil oppositions are taken for granted. And with conditions, the unconditional becomes one hell of a long there from here. Thanks to conditions, the planet is a puckery of life-long prison sentences for crimes inconceivable; crimes committed elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Elect are making whoopee, drunks on sabbaticals, taking holidays "abroad," boning up on Species Control and Methods of Creative Termination. For after all, isn't Earth a colony of spiritual criminals? One among many, even? And not only incarcerated are your fucked pucks and plucky pucks, but your backsliding holy pucks, who, caught remembering, are promptly executed, or failing that, are removed from the grasp of ordinary pucks by their mystification as saints. At the gate of eternity is an endless, ethereal queue of pucks-in-violation, waiting to do Time. And their sentence? Precious life!

--Zzzzzz ...

§§§

Chapter 9: From There to Iniquity

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