PrettyFakes

Okay, blame Professor Fury. He said I could do this. I aint taking the heat. This is a story, yes, an entire short story. Long for a post, but then, in hyperspace there’s infinite room, aint there?

Anyway. Just one little bit of preface. In what follows I do not intend to mock Christianity, but rather those who have blackened the image of Christianity. I am, after all, a good little preacher’s boy, and early formed my moral sense around the teachings of Jesus and have never seen a need to change them. If you wish further explication of my views, you may go to Salon.com, the readers’ blog, and find my post “Christians and Christianoids.” Or you could, if you fear being offended, just not read this thing. So anyway, here it is.

ENRAPTURIVATED

This is a story of twins.

Adolph, the oldest by a matter of three minutes and 25 seconds, became a fundamentalist preacher. Not just any preacher, but a preacher with his own television network and line of spiritually approved health-care products. One of the biggest sellers was Sanctified Air. For a mere $32,000 a team of technicians would come to your home and retrofit so that it was hermetically sealed. Then, for only $160 a week, tanks of compressed air would be delivered, air which had been blessed by Adolph himself during his weekly visit to the air-compression factory. You could jack the tanks into your system and breathe nothing but holy air, at least in your own house. Of course it was unfortunately necessary to go forth into the world from time to time, to your job for example, and then you had to breathe the same air as sinners.

But not in your own home.

Sanctified Air was also triple-filtered to remove allergy-causing particles, and you could purchase a device which imparted negative ionization for a real mood elevation, bringing you even closer to the Lord.

Andrew, on the other hand, flunked out of seminary. He wound up making a decent living as a middle school guidance counselor, but inwardly he was sad. He thought of himself as a spiritual failure, and if you were a spiritual failure it didn’t matter whether you were a success in other ways. Adolph himself said so, on his daily broadcast, in a segment they called Adolphalations.

Actually Adolph was on a good part of the day every day. There was a news program, which presented the news from a moral point of view. There were movies which the whole family could watch. There were sanctified cartoons. There was sanctified music—old favorites, to be sure, but also something for the younger faithful, holy rock, on a program called MyLordTV.

Adolph would pray on camera, no doubt to show how. There would be a shot of Adolph walking down the street, and then a trumpet would sound, and Adolph would begin to pray, while the other pedestrians fell back. “Lord,” Adolph would declaim, “Even as Thou hast smited the unbelievers with flood and hurricane and earthquake, even as Thou has brought AIDS down upon the heads of fornicators and homosexuals, so now we pray Thee show Thy might and power and cause that confounded cocaine-growing president of Carnivalandia to have his head blown off by a crack team of covert operatives.”

Adolph fasted, even though fasting wasn’t as fashionable an activity as it had once been. He liked to say that the Lord didn’t care about fashion. You could always tell when Adolph was fasting because the cosmeticians used a darker shade of tv make-up, and grayed his eyes and cheeks to make him look gaunter.

Things went on this way for a while, Adolph bringing his message to a larger and larger audience, Andrew falling deeper into the slough of despond.

Andrew wasn’t stupid, you understand. I say this in spite of the fact that he had graduated college in the United States, and had gone on to get a Ph. D. It wasn’t stupidity that had caused him to flunk out of seminary.

It was the weakness of his faith.

He tried, he tried hard, but he kept wondering about things. He wondered why, if God was love, God was always killing people. He wondered why, if it was true that you knew the tree by its fruits, the people of the Lord seemed so continually vindictive. He wondered how you could be punished for eternity in hell for a sin that only took five minutes to commit, and as near as you could tell, didn’t really hurt anybody, especially not Betty Lou Beaver Briggs, who had seemed to enjoy it while it lasted.

These were Doubts, Andrew knew, and Doubts were proof that you didn’t love God enough. Andrew tried to resist his Doubts, but they kept creeping back. Eventually he gave up and accepted the fact that he was a sinner doomed to roast in hell forever. He never married or had any children, even though his abstinence caused many of his neighbors to assume he was gay, because he didn’t want to pass on the wrath-of-God-inspiring scourge of Doubt.

When he was consoling a young girl whose lack of scholarly achievement was caused by the fact she was raped almost nightly at home, he didn’t think about roasting in hell forever. When he got it through a bully’s thick head that the weak don’t always stay weak, he didn’t think about roasting in hell forever.

But at home, alone, watching Adolphalations, he thought about it. One thing about forever, it went on for a long time.

Adolph founded a publishing house. At first the publishing house was just another form of vertical integration applied to the God business, but soon it took off. Adolph hired a stable of writers to produce sanctified novels, which they did. The novels sold well enough. But then, during a committee meeting with Adolph, they came up with a new idea.

“I need something dramatic,” he said. “Something that will throw the fear of God into people and sell a boatload of copies at the same time.”

Hmm, the writers said.

“When in doubt, appeal to the Good Book,” Adolph said.

There’s some pretty scary things in the Good Book, the writers said. How about this guy, he’s a Christian op for a supersecret U. S. spy agency, and he goes around casting devils out from out enemies. Some pretty great descriptions of like this herd of pigs going over a cliff when he casts the devil into them.

“Nobody wants pigs going over a cliff,” Adolph said. “Scarier.”

There was that woman, Ja-el—hey, she could be Kryptonian, related to Superman—she sleeps with this king, he’s a bad guy, but she has to sleep with him because she’s like undercover, and then when he goes to sleep, she nails him. I mean, literally drives a spike through the guy’s head. Whoa.

“That’s just one book,” Adolph said. “I’m talking a series here.”

Well you could do a series on the Children of Israel taking back the land flowing with milk and honey by killing all the inhabitants, children included, and all the sheep and cattle. Enough battles to make a series. Plenty of blood and gore, but justified blood and gore because, hey, they deserved it.

Adolph snorted. “They were Jews,” he said. “Not even Christian.”

Too bad we don’t have something apocalyptic to throw at them, the writers said. Apocalypse is all the rage nowadays.

Adolph sat straight up, the divine light of inspiration shining in his eyes. “But we DO have something apocalyptic,” he said.

That was the beginning of the Unrapturized series, which, as you know, went on to become a great success. The series was about all the terrible things that would happen to those who hadn’t believed on the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ, how when He came back all pumped up on holy steroids, leading an army of angels with flaming swords which were actually laser pistols, He would institute a reign of terror worse than anything Osama ever did. You think it’s bad now, the novels proclaimed. Just wait till the Rapture happens. Then you heathen sons of Satan are really gonna get yours. In fact, you’re gonna be ruled by Satan for a thousand years. We’ll see how you like that. (Satan was a hideous scaly monster, sort of like a fiery dragon with garbage breath and a bad attitude.)

Andrew tried reading one of the novels, but found it too bloody and disgusting for his taste, not to mention really badly written. This, he was certain, was a measure of his own Godlessness and Doubt.

Then one day it happened.

There was this hell of a noise coming from everywhere, a loud blaring sound that had to be The Last Trump, and the whole sky, all around the world, flared with a bright and blinding light. Everybody rushed out to see what was going on (except the people who were already outside, of course), and there they were, rising into the sky, millions of true believers, gazing up in adoration, or giving the finger to all those poor earthbound sinners who had made fun of them for so long and were now gonna get a redhot pitchfork up the butt forever.

It was with some surprise that Andrew found himself rising into the air as well. At first he was overjoyed, thinking he had somehow scraped through. But as he rose higher and the air got colder and he realized he needed to pee really bad but couldn’t because he might pee on somebody below, he realized there had been some mistake. It was just going to be worse when he got to Heaven and they found him out. He would be cast down into outer darkness, which also was, it seemed, a lake of burning fire. Invisible fire, presumably. Andrew hated heights. His worst nightmares were nightmares of falling.

After about five minutes of the rising thing, Andrew passed into the lower layers of a cloud cover. There was cloud cover over the entire planet, although you couldn’t see it till you got there because of the dazzling light.

Inside the clouds he felt himself pulled this way and that by invisible forces. Next thing he knew he was on a long conveyor belt heading towards an enormous pearly gate. It was really more like an instantaneous matter transmission portal, a gigantic sphere of swirling light. An old man with a white beard was standing beside the sphere at what looked like an airport ticket counter. Except for the beard and the white robes and the fact that he and the counter were taller than your average three-story building, the man was ordinary-looking. Andrew assumed the old man was Peter. The belt was crowded with people, some of whom were walking to get there faster. Along the way there were electronic message boards that said Glory Road and Please Keep to the Right unless Passing. Peter was studying the twenty-two-foot console in front of him, occasionally looking up to say, in a booming voice, as each person approached, “Okay. Okay. Okay.”

But when Andrew got there, Peter blinked in surprise. He punched a button to stop the belt. He looked back at his console.

“Confound it,” Peter said. “There’s been a mistake.”

“I knew it,” Andrew said sadly.

“Well, they’ll just have to deal with it inside,” Peter said. “I’m too busy to handle it here. I keep telling them to update the software.” He punched another button, and the belt resumed its motion, carrying Andrew through the light.

After that things were a little, well, cloudy for a while. Andrew was never sure what had happened, though later, before the mindwipe, he guessed he might have been in suspended animation. When he came to, he was sitting in what was really a very comfortable chair in what mostly looked like the V.I.P. lounge at an airport. There was a cup of coffee on a tray at his elbow, with just the right amount of cream. The coffee was steaming and gave off a wonderful aroma.

What didn’t look like a V.I.P. lounge was the thirty-foot angel sitting in a massive chair across from Andrew. The angel’s blonde hair was flying about like tatters of flame, but he wore a tolerant smile on his mighty features.

“Say,” the angel said. “Do you mind if I appear to you in my true form? These quarkatronic avatars give me a terrible itch in the annular ganglia.”

“Ah, no?” Andrew said. Why were they asking him? Couldn’t they do whatever they wanted? Maybe this was part of the torture. Maybe this was how it began. Sure. They wouldn’t just condemn him to eternal torment in a lake of fire. They would be way too sophisticated to stop there.

The angel began to flicker and fritz and fizzle, morphing into a set of tiny buzzing cubes. Then the image disappeared entirely, and, instead of an angel in a really big chair, there, resting on a tremendous circular platform, was a gigantic clattering arachnoid with ten glittering eyes and antennae and waving mandibles. The eyes were arranged in an inverted pyramid, one at the bottom, two next, three next, and a final row of four. It looked for all the world like a thirty-foot crab spider, except for the eyes and the fact that it rested on ten appendages and its chitin was a gleaming chartruese with yellow and blue detailing.

Andrew took a sip of his coffee. It was delicious. Usually coffee made him anxious and agitated, but this coffee seemed to calm his nerves.

There was a something like an immense transparent bowl beside the platform, a bowl filled with floating humans who all wore blissed-out expressions. Floating in smoky air, not a fluid. One of the floaters was his twin brother, Adolph. Come to watch the punishment of the evildoer, Andrew supposed.

“Pretty obviously we’ve solved the problem of the surface area to volume ratio,” a voice said, as if explaining something Andrew understood. “That is, evolution solved it for us. Forced-air respiration. Lungs, as it were.”

The voice was coming from speakers in the base of the platform.

“I hope you don’t mind talking to me,” the spider said. “Don’t worry, you won’t remember any of this later. Just that it’s such a pleasure. Conversation adds to the gustation, don’t you know. Only an uncivilized being would eat a creature it couldn’t talk to. Not that I’m going to eat you,” it added.

“Is that you?” Andrew said, meaning the voice.

Not very clear, but the spider seemed to understand. It made a series of squealing and chittering sounds, although some weren’t exactly sounds, like static on an old radio. “Yes, quite,” the speakers said. “Universal translator. Apologies for the dialect, old thing. Too many 19th –century British novels.”

“What,” Andrew said faintly. “Is. If I may ask. Going on?”

“Really I’m impressed,” the creature said. “You must be terrified, but still you’re curious. There’s hope for your kind after all.”

The giant arachnoid clattered over to the tank. It reached in with one of its hairy—legs? Arms? Grappling devices?—and lifted out a human, a woman. It waved the human around while it talked. Her blissful expression didn’t change.

“Flying saucers,” the spider said. “That’s what you used to call them. Our technology is far superior to your own.”

“That’s really kind of a cliché,” Andrew said.

“True nonetheless,” the spider responded. “The closest thing I can compare it to in your terms is pate de fois gras. Ever had pate de fois gras?”

“I’ve heard of it,” Andrew said.

“They force-feed a goose. The force-feeding does terrible things to the goose. It ruins the goose’s liver and causes the organ to hypertrophy. But the taste of the liver—to humans, of course—is heavenly.”

A species of gruesome chuckle emanated from the speakers.

“I love it when I do a pun,” the spider-thing said. “So anyway, we took over your media not long after the second of your so-called world wars. World wars! Such conceit. I’ve seen real world wars, even started a few, and believe you me—well, sorry, I digress. As I say, we took over your media, replaced a few essential people, mostly politicians and educators, with drones, and force-fed the general public with ideas that were either insane, malicious, or completely stupid. We also promoted bad health and weight problems. Nothing’s better than stupidity, unless it’s fat stupidity. Adds just that je ne sais quois.”

“But,” Andrew said.

“Like your cattle and chickens, if you see what I mean. Domesticated. Fed on meal and hormones. Become so specialized they can’t survive in the natural world, can’t hold their own, compete. They can only be kept alive within a complex system which, to them, must seem to exist for their own convenience. Then when the herd gets large enough, we come for the harvest.”

“But why not me,” Andrew said. “What’s wrong with me?” Then he thought to himself, I shouldn’t have said that. Not a good idea.

“Some people—you for example—resisted. Your brother didn’t. Oh, is that him in the tank? How sweet. That’s why you’re here, you see. A glitch in the DNA sorters. Put in a request for the latest models, but you know how bureaucracies are. Maybe when I take this load back to Altair. If I tell them how many more I could have produced if I had had better equipment.”

“I resisted?” Andrew said.

“Just so. Don’t mean to insult you, but your brain isn’t worth the trouble. Oh, it would supply a few nutrients, that sort of thing. But as for texture and taste. Hardly an epicure’s delight. The others, though—well, all I can say is the treatment gives their brains an indescribably delicious flavor.”

“You mean—“ Andrew said.

“Yes,” said the spider-beast. “Munchies.”

It brought the human to its mouth-parts. There was a loud whining and grinding, not unlike the sound of the dentist’s drill, and a smell of burning bone. Then a slurping, like thick liquid moving through a narrow pipe.

The spider flung the lifeless corpse into a corner, where, Andrew now noticed, there was a pile of headless human bodies. “Yummy,” it said, then added, in what came through the speakers as a confidential tone, “The trick is to keep them alive as long as possible while you suck out their brains. Oh,” it said. “I’m sorry. Did you want one?” Then it answered itself. “No, of course not. You aren’t adapted for boring through skulls. Silly me.”

The whole experience might be a part of the torture, Andrew thought. But he doubted it. His mind was very clear, and he felt quite calm.

The coffee.

“Not all a bowl of cherries, of course,” the spider said. “We have to deal with threats to the herd. Jesus. Buddha. Bhagavan Krishna. You wouldn’t believe how many humans we’ve lost to the truth, or just common sense.”

It pulled another human from the tank. This one was Adolph. Andrew felt that he should intercede, but really, there wasn’t much he could do. Besides, if Adolph was right, and this was hell, then that wouldn’t be Adolph, would it? “Can’t resist,” the spider-alien said. “Always this way after a fresh harvest. Can’t stop with just one. Lucky they don’t begrudge us a few for ourselves.”

I’m not going to remember all this, Andrew thought.

“Tell you something,” the spider said. It brought the vapidly smiling Adolph near the row of three eyes, which whirred and clicked. “Not a word to anybody else, though. Promise?”

Andrew made a sound.

“It’ll be our little secret,” the spider said. It rotated Adolph, then raised a couple of forelegs and peeled off the human’s black Ermanegildo Zegna with surprising delicacy. “There’s a part of the human body that’s almost as delicious as the brain. Especially if you allow a sense of pain. The sense of pain makes the brain even juicier. Adds just that last little touch of piquancy when they realize what’s happening. Terror is the best spice, you know.”

One of the forelegs sprouted a series of jointed devices. The spider held Adolph out for Andrew’s inspection, butt-first. The jointed devices, like slender robotic fingers, tapped one cheek of Adolph’s bare rear end.

“You mean?” Andrew said.

“Quite so,” the spider said. “The left behind.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 12:26 pm and is filed under In Mississippi, Jack. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.