by Borne Wilder
“You’ll see.” Azazel stopped in front of a rack of fishing poles and got down on her hands and knees. From her purse, she pulled a wad of hair from a sandwich bag.
“This is wonderful isn’t it? This is camel hair from the coat of John the Baptist. ‘The one, who cries out in the wilderness.’”
Ron’s heart dropped to his knees, he knew it had been too good to be true, she was having an episode. He had no problem fucking a crazy woman, he figured at least half of the women he had been with, were some kind of crazy, but he never took advantage of them in the midst of a mental break from reality.
“I knew this was going to go south, you’re straight up fucking nuts, aren’t you?”
Azazel smiled up at him. “Take off your trousers.” She began to swirl the wad of hair around in circles on the floor as if she were cleaning a spot on the tile. “Hurry, take off your trousers. Underwear too.”
"I go commando." If Ron had a ‘carved in stone’ rule against fucking schizophrenics, at that moment, he couldn’t think of it. He would sort it out later and somehow justify it.
He quickly removed his pants and tossed them next to the fishing poles, as he did, he saw a dark stain spread beneath Azazel’s wad of hair. Crazy Lady was rubbing away the floor.
“Pick up your trousers; you’ll want to look nice for my friends.”
“Oh yeah, they like half naked men sporting a chubby, with their pants in their hand, do they?” The black spot expanded to twice the size of a manhole cover. Azazel rose to her feet and stood on it, holding the towel she had taken from the shelf and the briefcase in one hand and beckoning Ron with the other. The dark spot was vibrating as he stepped onto it. A tingling spread across the roof of his mouth.
“Here, hold the towel over your penis; humans have a tendency to spray between dimensions. Hand me your trousers.” Azazel winked at him and Walmart disappeared and reappeared as a stark white room, with fifty or sixty naked men surrounding them. The men all were sipping from brandy snifters and murmuring in a strange language. When they saw Ron and Azazel, their faces lit up like children at Christmas.
“What the fuck just happened?” It was the most amazing magic trick Ron had ever seen. He looked down at the towel he had covering his dick, it was soaked. “I pissed myself.” Azazel squeezed his hand and giggled like a little girl.
“Don’t be afraid, these are my friends, they are celebrating.”
“It’s a fucking Sausagefest. I’m not going to be celebrating with them. I thought you and I were going to be swapping out some DNA?” Ron held the wet towel a little tighter to his crotch.
“Look around you, Ron, they don’t have genitalia, silly.” By then, all the men had noticed them and shouted in unison.
“Christós!”
“Ahhh, isn’t that cute, they taught themselves Greek.
“What in the fuck did they say?”
“Anointed one, that’s you; they are just darling, are they not? Here, you go, put your trousers on and let’s get busy.”
Getting busy was usually something Ron did, once his trousers were off. After he had donned his pants, one of the men offered Ron a snifter. Looking from the face of one naked man to another, to another, Ron realized the men were all identical in every way. All were grinning like idiots.
Azazel walked to a table in the center of the room and opened the case. Stacks of passports and bundles of hundreds filled it completely. Ron by-passed snifter formalities and downed his brandy. Azazel snapped her fingers, and one of the Identicals arrived with a fresh one.
“Don’t drink this one yet, you are going to need it for the shekel. You will want something to wash it down.”
“You weren’t shitting me about eating that thing?”
“If you want to be King, you must eat it.” Azazel laid the shekel in the center of the table and one by one the Identicals gathered around.
“What’s with all the twins?”
“They are my Watchers. When mankind was in its infancy, they and I helped man to understand the complexities of the world. They kept order.” Azazel scooted the brandy and coin across the table, toward Ron. “Are you ready to be King?”
The memory of the last time he touched Nolte’s nest egg revolted him, but in light of the money, Azazel’s magic and the dickless dudes, everything told him the crazy lady was on the level. Why would she show him all this, if she were just going to coin poison him? “What’s going to happen to me?”
“You will become like me.”
Ron glanced around the room at the Watchers, more to the point, at their blank crotches. “It’s not going to make my dick fall off, is it?”
Azazel smiled, she felt she had chosen wisely with Ron, he was going to make it all, so much fun. “No, your dick will not fall off.”
Ron brought the snifter closer to his mouth, “You didn’t put antifreeze in this, did you?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Fuck it.” Ron tossed the coin into his mouth and washed it down with brandy. Applause arose from the Watchers. The room began to strobe in and out of existence, one moment a thick, soundless void, the next applause and cheering from the men without dicks. One moment he was a disembodied presence, in complete darkness, the next he was holding an empty snifter, with a fire in his gut. The one constant, was a silver thread streaming out and away from him. In the white room it shot out from his stomach and disappeared through the far wall, in the void, it extended from nothing and went into infinity.
Memories that weren’t his and knowledge, beyond his comprehension, flooded into him. Ron screamed into both dimensions. The fire in his stomach was replaced with an empty hollow gnawing in the white room; in the void, it was gone. It felt as if someone was punching him in the stomach with the speed of a machine gun. In the white room, the cheering and applause grew in volume, in the darkness; silence. The void trembled, as millions of bits of information flooded into him through the silver thread.
Light began to form in the void, a green glow slowly spread through the blackness. The pulsating between the dimension swap slowed like a roulette wheel that seemed to favor black, each flash into the void grew longer, as time in the white room became shorter until the white room no longer appeared. The silver roulette ball had finally come to rest, wholly in the silence of the void. Ron watched bulges in the thread; move in a pulsing succession toward him, as if he were being fed liquid information in spurts and gobs through a cartoon garden hose.
Ron had failed high school Spanish, but the thread allowed him to see each thought he had, in hundreds of languages at once, without confusion. He had never cracked a physics book, but suddenly understood both, the strong and weak force of gravity and how it was an illusion, supplied from a far larger dimension; he could only feel. In fact, all of the laws of physics were pumped into the universe through two filters, one from the center of creation, and one into the quantum fabric. Ron had never before heard of quantum fabric. He had always associated gravity with apples.
What once was a place to ponder and speculate, Ron’s mind was full to bursting with data, from the formation of every star, to the rise and fall of every civilization, with every speck of knowledge, gleaned from sun-bleached bones and tucked neatly into an amazing spectrum of information and complete understanding. Ron watched the last bulge in the thread flow into his essence. With it came a voice, “Go prepare my throne on Earth.” Ron recognized the voice, it was his.
The void dissolved into the white room, the applause became screams of triumph. The Watchers were almost frenzied; Azazel had tears rolling down her cheeks, she looked even more beautiful. In that moment Ron realized that she had been wrong, swallowing the coin did not make him like her, she was nowhere near him in the pecking order. Ron had become God.
***
“Where’s the gate, Baal?”
“Baal believes it to be in Sporting Goods.”
“Look at what they’re driving.” Jeremiel parked the Prius in the same row as the Diablo but al
lowed ten or twelve spaces between the two cars.
Michael whistled through his teeth. “Must be nice to be on the wrong side, huh Jerry?”
Charlie had awoken when the car had pulled into the parking lot; the yellow Lamborghini was hard to miss. It was no wonder Ron wouldn’t answer his calls. Charlie no longer felt guilty about the bullet hole in his brother’s seat. “Motherfucker. Is that what that chick drives?” He imagined Ron was beside himself. Ever since he had seen Dumb and Dumber, Ron had said that he would offer his left nut, as a sacrifice to the car gods, for that exact same car.
“Azazel prefers Rolls or Bentleys, I’m thinking that is the carrot at the end of a stick,” Jeremiel said flatly. “I’m sure she has offered you brother the world on a silver platter, by now.”
Michael shot Jeremiel a sour look, yet he knew that sooner or later, he would have to fill Charlie in, if for no other reason than to keep him safe. “Your brother might have made a deal with Azazel. She needed the coin and one of you to start the End of Days.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? This is the end of time, Revelation shit? Ron runs a bar. Why would she need him to start the End of Days?”
Nolte chuckled, “Nolte gets fucked again. That bitch told me I was going to live forever. There has to be some fucking law against broken promises in Heaven and Hell.”
“There is,” Baal growled.
Michael pointed a finger at Nolte, indicating that he should shut up. “Yeah, Revelation shit. That coin can tie one of you three, to Satan. I’m pretty sure, that if your brother doesn’t take her up on her offer, she’ll be out here talking to you in a few minutes, and if you turn her down, she’ll resort to the old man.”
“She’s asking Ron to sell his soul? He’ll never fucking do it, at least not for a Lamborghini. She’ll have to do a lot better than that.” Even as Charlie said it, he doubted it; he knew how much Ron wanted a supercar. Couple that with Ron’s skepticism about God, and who fucking knows what would happen. “After all the shit we’ve seen in the last three days, what could she offer him to make him want to sell his soul?”
“Everything, and by Everything, I mean everything. If he uses the coin to tie himself to Lucifer, he will own the world. That is, he’ll own it until Lucifer wants it back.”
“How did Ron and I get caught up in this shit? Other than the cash, we wanted nothing to do with the fucking coin.”
“If you needed an Anti-Christ, who would you pick, your brother, you, or the idiot running around in a diaper?”
“Fuck him, take Nolte, he’s the one that started this shit.”
“Fuck you Cupcake, we wouldn’t be sitting here if it weren’t for your greedy, thieving asses.”
“Yeah, he did start the ball rolling, but his entire reasoning is based on avoiding hell, he’s not going to trade into it.” Michael scratched the tip of his nose. It didn’t itch, but it gave him a second to think of a more gentle way of saying, Charlie’s brother was going to be fucked for eternity.
“Damn straight I’m not trading into it, my goal is pussy and pussy forever, I don’t need that yellow piece of shit over there. I have a ‘Vette.”
“I’m not here to Judge, but no one pushed Ron into anything, he was given a choice.”
“How in the fuck would you know what he was given, you’ve never left my sight?”
“Everything works around the free will of humans, even the liars won’t cheat this rule, will they Baal?”
Baal grunted and looked out the window.
“We are held to a higher standard than humans, because we have seen the truth, therefore, our punishment for breaking the rules is much harsher. Hell is not the worst place to be, believe me. Ask Baal, it’s the reason he’s keeping his mouth shut right now.”
“Fuck this shit, I’m stopping him.” Charlie opened the car door.
Baal laughed.
Michael put his hand on Charlie’s arm. “Have you ever heard the verse, ‘put on the full armor of God’? It may sound cliché, but unless you’re wearing it, you will more than likely, end up fighting Ron to take his place.”
“So I’m supposed to sit here, while my brother sells himself to eternal damnation, or whatever the fuck it is?”
“I can’t tell you what to do, and I can’t judge you, I’m just informing you. You have free will.” The lights in the Walmart and throughout the parking lot dimmed and the ground rumbled.
Baal laughed again.
Michael looked Charlie in the eyes, “I think you no longer have a say in the matter. Follow me.” Michael got out of the car and pulled Charlie’s door the rest of the way open. “How would you like a Lamborghini?”
Charlie followed the angel over to the Diablo. Michael ran his hand over the rear window and the supercar came to life.
“How did you do that?”
“Remote start, the stupidest idea man ever thought up. Their laziness makes their, half a million dollar cars completely vulnerable.” Michael smiled. “I’m just showing off, if he would have left it in gear, it wouldn’t have worked.”
“These fuckers cost a half a million?”
“They’re a little south of that, but for all intents and purposes, yeah.” Michael walked around to the driver’s side and ran his hand across the door. The door slid up and open. “Same thing on the doors, I mean how hard is it to twist a key?” The angel asked incredulously. He reached into the car and opened the glove compartment. “Look at that,” he showed Charlie the spare key and stuck it into the ignition. “Now you don’t have to break the dash open to shut it off. Plus, these little gems like to rip through the fuel; it would drink a lot of cash if you had to leave it running.” Michael stepped out of the way and gestured to the car. “Get in. I know this is hard to understand, but there is and always will be things that we can’t change the direction of, once they take a certain path. I’ve been tempted to step in tens of thousands of times, but I couldn’t. Go back to your car in New Orleans, I’ll meet you there tomorrow and let you get your money.”
“What the hell will Ron do without a car?”
“He doesn’t need cars anymore. I’m sure he’s already forgotten about this thing. If you don’t take it, some asshole, tow truck driver is going to tow it, and they try to hurt these on purpose.”
Charlie pressed on the accelerator, and the engine roared. “Shit.”
Michael smiled. “Yeah, this is one of the Jotas, only fifteen of them made.”
“How does an angel get to know so much about cars?”
“I take them on joyrides all the time.”
Charlie looked at the Walmart. Not only was he being told to bail on his brother, but leave him without a ride, as well.
“Hit the road, Charlie, there’s nothing you can do at this point. Just a heads up, watch out for reverse, they geared it way too high.” Michael shut the door and stepped back, spinning his finger.
Charlie looked down at the shifting paddles. “How in the fuck do you drive this thing?” The Lamborghini jumped forward and shot across the parking lot. He pulled out onto the street and headed north until he thought the angel could no longer hear him (of course he had no idea how well an angel could hear), and turned around. He wasn’t going to let his brother fuck up.
Michael listened to the Diablo fade into the distance then turn around. He couldn’t blame the guy; if it were him, he’d do the same thing.
***
“So what do you do, Jerry?” Nolte asked, trying to sound whimsical. “Believe it or not, I’m interested in this Heaven shit. I might even be persuaded to switch teams.”
Jeremiel turned to look the foul little man directly in the face. “You have no idea what you’ve given away.” Part of him felt a seething anger toward the skinny human, yet, another part felt extreme pity. Jeremiel felt sorry for even the worst of humans.
The softening of the angel’s demeanor was not lost on Nolte. “So, do you live in a big mansion beyond the pearly gates, with little cupids flying around?”
“What’s the pussy situation like up there in the clouds? Is it all young and tight?” Nolte stuck a dog-legged Pall Mall in his teeth. “I do like me some young pussy. Yep, if they’re old enough to pee, they’re old enough for me. If they can sit on the curb and their feet touch the street, they are old enough for my meat. Yep, I do like the young pussy.” Nolte noticed the angel’s expression was anything but soft at this point. The extra-dimensional grip the fag had on Nolte was slipping; the poof was having a hard time keeping both him and Baal pinned down. “Yep, I do like___”
“Not one more word Dog. Not one more word.” Nolte leaped as far away from Jeremiel as the Prius would allow.
Baal shook his head. “You have no understanding of who or what he is, do you?”
Nolte adjusted his bug shades and grinned around his Pall Mall. “Shut the fuck up, Runt.” Nolte looked out the window. Across the street, to the north was The Liquor Box. Nolte’s mouth watered, he was tired of tiny bottles. He wanted a slug, not a sip. Across the street to the west, was St. Something-or-Other, obviously Catholic. To Nolte, Catholic churches always stuck out like a sore dick, with their pompous stone and choddity-cha. He thought all Catholics were show-offs. In fact, he thought all Christians were show-offs, they all seemed to know that what they had was off limits to him and wanted to rub his nose in their stink-less shit, every chance they got.
This church stuck out like a wart on a sore dick, with a Walmart parking lot for a front yard. Serves those haughty cocksuckers right, he thought, even God couldn’t stop the American dream from taking a shit on their front steps.
“I don’t know why you're letting yourself get upset, Jerry, unless...unless you’re a virgin. Are you a virgin, Jerry, no stinky on your pinky?” Jeremiel got out of the car and opened the door on Baal’s side. Nolte felt the angel’s hold slip completely away.
“Keep an eye on Shorty, Jerry, I’m blowin’ this popsicle-stand.” Nolte vanished.
