Athens, Greece
vafx@hol.gr
LOOSE
by
Vasilis Afxentiou
(A short story from my anthology 'Potpourria')
( Available at: http://www.m-pro.demon.co.uk/bookstore.html
)
Up top, Charlie's eye seemed to be glued on what he held. He
dithered more, undecided.
Meanwhile down below, Satan's jaws crunched. He strutted back
and forth in the gloomy fissure, the deepmost in His blaze-lit,
sulphur-reeking sovereignty, and His rusty chaffed face with
nostrils flaring, glared up and sneered, snorting grunts and
chuffing and casting bandeaux of spume.
He raised His yellow-brown hands incitingly, "I crave for
the Inquisition, the children's crusades, the sprightful witch
hunts, and those two sublime mushrooming obfuscations. Ah, those
were the days, My lackeys."
Lately He had been having these pricks of elation, pangs of
notorious jubilance. He espied on Charlie and other mortals
above--mingled in crowds, snooped and eavesdropped to locate
the source of these affections--but soon would become weary
of their pointless prattle and skeptical attitude towards Evil.
In place of rash rage and fury, He found them ruminating and
poring over Freud and Hawking.
He spat.
Hadn't He racked and abused them enough over the eons? Such
spleen and spite gone to waste. He anticipated exclusively the
vilest, blindest passions and ill will to rule.
Instead...He got blinked at.
"Inactivity is what's doing it."
"But idle hands are the Devil's workshop," a red-eyed
demon puffed out.
"See!" He hissed. "Even the laws of darkness
are being confounded!"
Inaction was lacquering as well His own animosity to shoddy
resentment, fraying His hostility down to the scruffy crust
of His rangy clientele.
"Business is going to the dogs," He snarled and the
gargoyles rattled nigh His clacking hoofs.
All the slithering things hissed and sputtered, defecated and
slobbered down in the blistering guts of the earth.
"Isn't it the way it ought to be?" a scaly imp fumed
from the ghastly gallery.
The underworld fell silent.
Satan swelled and let fly a jet of gore on the apprentice imp.
"We never use the word 'ought' here."
***
Vexed, Satan came up once again to meddle and pry.
He found mid-August a scorcher. Crickets popped from the heat,
burst like pop-corn in near-by thistle and pines and toppled
to the ground shattered. Lizards scurried for cover at His approach.
A summer ruby dragonfly flittered and dipped almost vertical
in His path, then vaulted out of view. Clouds of metallic blue
butterflies dispersed off their gold and waxen perches and rippled
over his head.
He emerged close-by to the gates of Hell, a sandy stretch nudists
patronised on the Aegean called Esperanza Island. To each side
the beach spanned as level and regular as could be conceived
for a kilometer or so. Then with a dull, lethargic bounce commenced
to worm inward, finally rising in a smooth curve to meet the
foot of the single distant mountain on the isle, behind a precipice,
like some broad highway from the sea.
He pulled his horns in. Sucked his tail. Shucked off His scales.
And metamorphosed into the Angel He once was.
He pouted out his lips, "God it's hot," He said, His
new alto voice husky and almost as raspy as a man's.
"Did You call Me?" a tumult boomed from the sky.
The Old Man stood like an ancient Atlas on billowed white clouds,
majestic and towering.
"O Lord!" Satan fidgeted with his nakedness. "A
figure of speech."
"Didn't we agree for You to rule from below and I from
above?"
Got to humour Him--got a hell of a temper, Satan thought, and
became disconcerted.
"Are You trying to make this Your domain as well?"
the Old Mighty asked and a sirocco ruffled Satan's red curls.
The breeze got stronger and the clouds tumbled like bowling
balls.
God looked at the sprawled bodies, Mites on a Titan's gold scimitar,
He thought, examining the crescent shore that dipped and became
lost in a sea of azure blood.
He reminisced, How immaculate the blood of Gaia had been. How
all shores once resembled this one.
He saddened, Vilified are the same seas now. Oil spills. Dumped
radio-active canisters, swaying like cobra heads beneath crushing
water depths. Eager to ejaculate their poison into life.
Life He had created.
In the begining Earth had been a fresh crunchy apple, beads
of dew clinging to it. Mankind had been tucked deep away, safe
in His heart of hearts. The touch of musk on His toes had consoled
Him then, had made Him sigh with pleasure, compassion and grace.
Sensations of never before.
He remembered how the animals, the trees, the shrubs, the birds
and the butterflies of every color, the kelp and the starfish
had rushed out of Him exactly as He had imagined them. The tiny
and the huge. Lastly, man, the crown jewel. He would enter their
lairs and grottos and dreams and see Himself in them.
Now this.
Had ever present entropy overpowered Him?
Cosmology, He thought, pitted against the Overseer of Good.
He was ensued by a great void. He wondered if it all had not
been a Divine mistake.
"Might I have not passed boredom on to them?"
"Say something, Lord?"
"SILENCE!"
The hideous ripping noise on all sides startled Satan. He gave
a small scream, froze, thawed down to a jellyfish and oozed
back up into his angel shape and reached for Charlie. Why, oh
why did I ever take this job? Satan consternated.
A mistake, a moment of weakness, frivolity, God continued to
ponder to Himself, the mortals inherited. The forbidden fruit
of knowledge only to become their robe of wisdom.
The snare of God, God thought on reflection, was His utter lack
of a wholesome awareness of Evil.
He feared that in His ignorance goodness's child had been a
child of His loneliness and not of His Love and of His Law,
but a yield to experimentation, curiosity and the restlessness
of His youth.
Seven billion years, not seven days--how mortals simplified
His grandeur to their measures--of maelstroming, taming and
smithing a universe for the coming of life: strange, nebulous,
breathtaking. All to prepare it for His new companions. Another
five to hone the Earth to the exact of mankind's germaneness.
He had begun as if with a game, instead Creation had welled,
overspilled beneath Him, dislodging from Him, like argent elvers
splashing forth from a broken water bag. Cunning eyes, wily
grins, pesky faces had beamed tenacity and aptness and survival.
It was less a course of plan than happenstance.
He had been overwhelmed back then.
"Oh, so long ago."
"Toad turds to the three-hundred-and-fifty-days-of-sunshine.
It's not September even."
"Who said that!" thunder boomed.
"Don't, Lord," Satan hurried and said, thinking that
modesty can be overdone.
Satan turned to the other, "Charlie, button up."
There was an odd light in God's eyes, a sign that made Satan
sorry He'd spoken at all.
"That's what the sign said. Over the airport terminal six
years ago when I set foot here -- 'Three-hundred-and-fifty days
of sunshine'. It's just their lousy luck," Charlie looked
meaningfully at the Other and gestured to the sprawled tourists,
"to be here the fifteen days it's going to douse."
"Six years ago, Charlie?"
"Yeah. Weather was different, a paradise." The youth's
face suddenly became well-defined. A shaft of sun passed through
a rift in the clouds and shone on it. He had regular features,
brown round eyes, brown light hair and a slight growth of beard.
He might have been a Kentucky farmer's boy. "Who were You
talking to up there anyway?"
"Hear that, Lord? Things were different." Then to
Charlie, "God, Charlie. To God. I may have saved your--you
from eternity just now."
"Strong shit, ain't it?" Charlie dragged in a waft
and Satan saw only the white of his eyes.
"Ouch!" All of Satan's defences went on alert.
"Is that mortal smoking hashish, Lucifer?" Amazement,
dread and execration churned in the words.
The heavens boiled with white-grey fury. Clouds effused, irradiated
red flashes against the silver and blue of the sky. The thick
plumes puckered squarely over Charlie's stoned head.
Satan almost peed.
He could taste the hot, moist air of a killer storm brewing.
No backing out now, He thought. He wasn't up here to save souls.
But new blood was what he wanted and it was pooled in Charlie's
fate--and genom.
Humanity Mine, He lavished. Revive remorse of 'the slumming
life', arouse compunction about ol' avarice, coveting, and civil
strife; contrition for good ol' false pride, bipartisan morass;
and just sit back and make room for the guilt-beset, shame-ridden
hoards....If Charlie only keeps his flappers fused.
He rummaged to get His act together. For Hell's sake.
He had come to realize on His sojourns that it wasn't that mortals
didn't take Him under account, no.
People merely dread more the evil in themselves, and what it
can do to them while still in this life, than what I dish out
in the next.
People simply feared more for the here and now than afterlife.
Today they wanted association, the New Order, brotherhood, prophylactics,
life for Rwanda; and it all had started when those hippy heads
sprouted, and more recently, when that Tipler fellah was being
tipped with the inside dope--straight from up there.
Satan gruffed.
He needed old fashion, unequivocal Gospel Sinning. Sin-anxious
mortals. None of this doubt-eradicating, Cosmos-probing, high-tech-for-high-peace
stuff.
"Our mysteries are Ours," He grunted.
No yuppie yo-yos shouting, Make business not war, or, Greenpeace
greenbutts yodelling, Be true to blue.
He wanted the greenback to read In Arms We Trust and, by gosh,
the Wall put back up.
"He's been getting all the kudos," Satan griped under
His breath, "and I all the barbs."
There was much to justify in His own accomplishments.
His tanned tawny cheeks and alluring almond eyes, half-hidden
by magnificent lashes, faced up at God, "Lord, You know
mortals smoke hashish. Shoot up horse--beg Your pardon--heroin.
Sniff coke and crak, swallow uppers and downers--and all those
pretty colors in between.
"Omniscient that You are, You are aware that they drink
or dope themselves to death, or smoke to waste, or eat themselves
to the grave."
He took a deep breath. "Men mortals whore and women mortals
adulterate. Men fornicate with men and women with each other--and
You must know--that today sex before wedlock is free and as
common as promiscuous sex in the institution of marriage."
The clouds hovered, undecided, above Charlie's blown skull.
Satan saw that this time Charlie hardly noticed the gloom ingest
him, and Satan felt a stronger squeamishness, and a burst of
anger at His endless unease. He shut His eyes stiffly, then
opened them briskly.
"Lord, jails are so full they're spilling over trash back
into the streets. Policemen, lawyers, politicians, doctors,"
he hesitated some, "people of the cloth, are turning their
views elsewhere--"
"What are You getting at?" God roared, above comatose
Charlie with the smouldering joint still locked in his fingers.
"Your churches are half-filled on Sundays. My churches--the
bars and casinos and dives--are packed every day and are worse
than the jails at night. To one of Your temples there is a thousand
of Mine, Lord.
"What I'm getting at?" Satan glanced at a careening
Charlie, and behind His back He crossed His long, manicured
fingers. "I should be getting more than I bargained for,
Lord. I mean there's no distinction between down there and up
here any more. It should of been like too much for one of Me
to handle. But, Lord, it ain't!
"Something, somewhere along the line is going wrong. People
aren't trespassing, aren't violating the Law, out of simple
spite or ignorance or disregard for guilt. Remorse they suffer,
but they're rationalizing it out these days. Transgression is
just one more abstract concept added to the long list of paradoxes
We've been ladling out to them through the millennia. Irrelevant
to the educated, is what I'm getting at. And the world is more
exposed to sophistication today than ever before.
Or maybe," He tossed the bate, "just maybe now, Somebody
is not doing Their share of the work."
"Are You accusing Me of abstention?"
A lethal violet fringe sprayed static electricity into the air
around. Sand devils hopped and danced, whirling over the stuporous
naked bodies. Then wind gushed by, the wake of the crossing
of something vast. Out at the distant horizon ascended a monstrous
tidal swell amassing into an alp.
Spikes drove into Satan's back, smashing the breath out of Him.
Not too far off, clouds and water assimilated in grim platinum
oneness, a drab press of sea and sky.
Charlie, head flung back, jaw agape, whined like a struck dog,
a sound Satan had never heard before.
He's had it, Satan thought. Poor Charlie.
There's no stopping Him now. His ego is the biggest, and He's
gonna blow it, along with stoned Charlie. Got to buy time, or
I'll forfeit'im: The one and only soul in true conflict between
Good and Evil, traditionally legitimate, not yet lost to titular
and perfunctory worship or indifference. A last chance to revamp
afresh My realm--blown.
"Lord," Satan said, His voice a sibilant whisper,
"this mortal is a prize unlike any other."
"What are You talking about?" The skies resounded.
"He's getting high, like all the others, isn't he? What's
so special about Charlie Emanuel Woodsmith? I am going to strike
them all down."
"I don't care about the rest. They aren't coming down below."
"They are certainly not destined for Paradise."
"But Charlie, Lord, may be."
***
Satan scooped sand and dumped it on His nakedness. "I've
been trying to tell You all along. There're more people dying
today yet the souls I get get fewer and fewer. And I'd wager
same thing's happening in Paradise."
"Well, the last century has been lean. I thought they strayed
Your way. There must be millions unaccounted..."
"Billions! Earthquakes and floods in Asia and the Americas,
famines and epidemics in Africa, skirmishes and sub-wars everywhere--"
"Purgatory?"
"Nope. I checked."
"Then where?" God asked, and the southerly wind blew.
"Since the end of the Second Great War, hitting peak in
the sixties and levelling off in the early seventies, some matured
force tampered with clear-cut Good and Evil, Lord."
"With Creation? The Rules had been set down long before
that."
"You know that and I know it. But could those black holes--that
'horizon of events'--they discovered recently, and that babel
about flower power, could they be sucking'em up?"
Satan glanced at wavering Charlie. "What happens if they
stop crediting Us, deify Jung, the media, Sagan, The Physics
of Immortality? How can faith and fear abide in the face of
this avalanche of enlightenment, this flash-flood of knowledge
and exposure to everything that once had been only Our secrets?
Why don't they burn scientists, and journalists, Lord, any more?"
"I AM THAT I AM."
The sea rose and rushed in great heaves and the earth wavered
and shimmied like so much flab at the utterance of this Truth.
The clouds convoluted in gigantic flashing orbs. They eclipsed
the sun and filled the sky to the azimuth.
"It's awful!" Charlie screamed.
Satan felt him gasp, wince and shake uncontrollably. Hold on,
babe, He egged on silently, a little longer, don't turn into
a pillar of salt on me now.
Then He turned to God, "Ok, ok. But what if?"
"You know the answer."
"No!" Satan's face caricatured, aghast.
God nodded and the ground under Charlie throbbed.
"Oh, poor Kid. Not the Wood again."
"Would you prefer Nemesis, the Great Deluge or Sodom and
Gomorrah all over again? Religion is sanctioned as a proviso
of faith. No faith, no religion. No religion...man is next.
Are You ready for man on the loose?"
"Are We?" Lucifer let out a dragging moan.
"So, Charlie is the only and last vacillating believer."
"The only honest of the faith left, my sources say. But
he's trying to get bad. You witnessed it."
Satan's grits braced, "Let him battle it out alone, Lord,
not like the other One. See whose gonna win the tug-o-war inside
this final one fellah, clean and straight like. I'll take back
what I said, about Whose not doin' Their share."
"Teacher, isn't he, a language teacher? Has a way with
children? Unpretentious chap, a bit idiosyncratic. Doesn't quite
fit in with his peers?"
"That's him. A deal?"
"Of course."
"Shake on it?"
God eyeballed Satan.
The havens smiled. The clouds scattered. The summer afternoon
sun reigned once more over a beach sprinkled with bronze bodies.
Charlie stopped boring his hands into the sand to buttress against
another quake. He squinted up at the sun and realized that it
must have all been a hallucination.
He looked around. The fiery-haired, violet-eyed angel waived
to him from an alcove beneath the precipice, blew a kiss, and
made the sign for Victory.
Charlie chagrined at the bounce of the angel's haunches, rubbed
his stinging eyes and saw that he was waving back at an empty
space of shore.
"Never again," he said and collapsed.
He lay curled up, napping. He dreamed that he was playing five
card stud with two sleazy-looking dudes, one wore a robe of
silk the other vaunted the Spock look, and that his hand was
as rotten as a hand can be.
There came a disturbed expression on Charlie's face, an impression
of having been cheated from his joy and of having had his peace
left naked to the world.
End
