Killing the Last God

These words are true words.

Hear that? Outside, the homeless people are singing again. This, of course, means we have officially reached the back side of the summer season. Go on, consult your fucking Farmer’s Almanac if you don’t believe me, because it’s a well-documented phenomenon: VSCWCA. Vonnegut’s sacred cattle warble come August.

What I tell you is true. You oughta know that about me, after all this time, after all this time.

I buy a newspaper on my way into the office. Every. Single. Morning. It’d be way cheaper to subscribe, but the news is just so bad, and I don’t want to support that. The news is bad, but advertising offers various paths to relief. It’s like my dearly departed momma used to say: There’s nothin’ that a Foley’s Red Apple Sale and two-for-the-price-of-one tube socks can’t cure.

I prop my feet up on my desk, mix 500 milligrams of pure crystalline powdered caffeine into a bottle of Evian water, shake it, and finally announce to the world that I am ready to see my first client of the morning.

I have a feeling of time passing. When I again notice my surroundings, there’s this little man sitting across from me, talking. Caught unawares, I begin taking notes, on the off chance that this is something important. It seems like what a competent professional might do in this situation.

And this, this man – all fifty-five pale and wrinkly inches of him – it seems he wants to hire me out. Wants to get him some of that legal representation he’s always hearin’ about. This pale and wrinkly man, he thinks he might need to be defended inside a court of law, only he does not know from what.

He just feels awfully guilty about… something. Something bad.

Understand, back when I was in law school, they never taught us how to get a man acquitted from a prosecution of his own conscience. But a crazy man’s money’s as good as that of a sane man, so I agree to represent him. I mean, hell, I just saw in the paper that Foley’s is having a Red Apple Sale, for God’s sake. Take his money, go get me some tube socks!

A girl’s gotta do…

Anyway, the little man, he leaves. I sits at my desk, feet still propped up. Take a swig of water, stare at the retainer check. And I know right away, all’s I can do is call Harry and get him to try and figure out what the little man’s problem is.

Harry is a semi-reformed drug dealer who I use as a semi-private investigator on a semi-regular basis. He once got arrested for snorting Viagra off the back of his hand in a strip club parking lot. He considered that to be a good day.

So Harry listens to what I have to say and he accepts some cash and off he goes. Off to find the source of my client’s existential guilt.

Have I mentioned all of this is true?

I send my intern out to purchase tube socks for me. You know, the kind that go all the way up to the knee and have those three red stripes around the top? A lot of guys have some sort of weird fetish about a girl in knee-high tube socks and a skirt, and the way I figure it, you know, who am I to, um, deny a guy his, um… you know…

Where was I? What next? Oh! Well, next thing I know, Harry’s back. And he’s only been gone like three hours, but he has a busted lip and he carries what looks like a potato sack with him. I think the lip is new since this morning, but I know the sack wasn’t there before, and it looks to be full of bricks.

“Is that a sack of bricks in your hand, Harry, or are you just happy to see me?”

“It’s a sack of bricks, Adri.”

Harry tells me that they are seed bricks, and that we have to go bury them, and soon. So even though my intern’s still not back from Foley’s, Harry and I drive out about two blocks away from my townhouse and randomly choose a front yard to dig up. Well, semi-randomly.

We throw the bricks in, we cover the hole with dirt, and hocus pocus, ipso facto, we go to West Gray Café for some lunch.

Two hours later… Walking streets, now gray and wet. We are hopelessly lost in a neighborhood I thought I knew after all this time, after all this time. It is quickly apparent to me that the seed bricks are responsible, that they’ve sprouted into this labyrinthine, muddy Soviet-era ghetto while we’ve been at lunch. And somewhere someone is howling, which isn’t entirely unusual when I am around, I’ll grant you, but this howl sounds unusually sad, even desperate.

And I ask Harry how it is this town and all these tenement buildings got here. How’d it all fit inside my little neighborhood?

Harry says, “I think it is the way they folded it.”

We come to a colorless door in a colorless warehouse, and I get that feeling down in my guts that this is the door we’ve been looking for without even knowing it. The one we’re here for, Harry and me. We go in. We descend more stairs than you could shake a stick at, if you had a stick and wanted to shake it at some stairs.

We eventually come to a tiny stone basement, lit by a single, swinging, 40-watt light bulb (but this kind of room is always lit by a single swinging 40-watt light bulb, isn’t it?). The villagers are all there, standing around, all twitching with a disgusting palsy of some sort. Most appear to be double or even triple amputees. They weep.

My kind of crowd…

On a table in the center of the room writhes a large, white, tadpole-like creature, clearly in agony.

Soon as I see it, I know this tadpole is responsible for my client’s sense of guilt.

Harry hands me a very tiny hammer. None of the villagers make a move to stop me as I walk to the table, raise the tiny hammer into the air, and bring it down on the eggshell skull of the white tadpole. Everyone is splattered with bits of flesh, intestines, and whatever passes for blood in a, you know, big white tadpole.

I can hear this awful suction sound as I lift the hammer out of the violated white body to have another go at it.

Bam, squish. Bam. squish.

This goes on for a while. Longer than seems strictly necessary, actually. I get to the point where hammering this thing just isn’t going to make it any deader. I wipe the hammer on my slacks and hand it back to Harry.

I say, “Come on, Harry, let’s go home.”

I say, “I have some tube socks waiting for me back at the office, and I’d like to have time to listen to the homeless people singing this afternoon.”

I say, “You really MUST catch their multiphonic Tuvan songs this time of year.”

What? Is there part of this tale that you doubt?

Which part?

Have I ever led you astray before, after all this time, after all this time?