Eucharist for a Sinless Mankind by Bertil Falk Table of Contents

Chapter 2: The Not-Sinning Ones part 5 of 7

Sullen like few people, Xavier Pascal left the Department of the Incorporation of New Worlds. At the portal he ran across Carolus Brainflower. The two men stopped, looked each other, as the saying goes, up and down, saluted with next to imperceptible movements and passed by each other without a word.

When Xavier Pascal entered his space-jalopy, he lost even more of his already lost temper. He compressed his lips and let escape some stupid remarks in the presence of his crew, remarks he would later regret.

He rushed to his cabin and summoned Lieutenant Sigourney Nagy, who instantly understood that something had gone wrong. The short, plump woman wore her patrol uniform with an inborn naturalness.

Her lustrous, mother-of-pearl skin shimmered in glossy greens, pinks and blues. It tightened across her cheekbones, and her penetrating eyes burned like Usurpian vaginal emeralds. In her capacity as the captain’s assistant, she knew her “Pappenheimer” inside and out — an idiom meaning she knew what to expect from him.

“We shall return,” the statement escaped his lips while he was taking off his dirty boots. “Find the co-ordinates of the sling. We must find that confounded convent cum monastery.”

“The Department?”

“Yes.”

“What did I say!!”

“Do as I say. Do not argue!”

“Aye, aye, sir,” she said tauntingly and threw him an old-fashioned salute.

He threw one of his boots at her, but the quick lieutenant was out of the cabin before he had even thought the thought. The dirty boot hit the transparent pasemite of the door.

Yes, yes, she had warned him not to do it. But he had gotten so furious when he understood what those clerical people had done that he had unhesitatingly resorted to the sling and moved the convent-monastery to a place where their machines of indoctrination would do neither harm nor good.

That evening I see The King in Yellow on one of the mental theatres in the vicinity of Times Square in the constellation of the Elephant. The solemn play leaves behind a singular tinge of malevolent romance and perverted beauty.

When I take the yellow programme rolled up in my right hand and slowly move vertically along the mezzanine and walk into the vestibule, it turns out that my multi-dimensional raincoat is no longer in the checkroom. After a meaningless exchange of views, I am the last visitor who walks out onto the pavement.

It is raining like hell and I am not exactly surprised as I see a yellow hearse, a VolksRoyce — an extremely old and very silly cross between two so-called makes in principle incompatible — parked on the street. A yellow coffin with a glass lid worthy of a Snow White is carried out by ladies in yellow tailcoats. In the coffin is an Earthling with a countenance that looks like chewing-gum and a character inspired by papyrus or parchment. The coffin slides past me into the theatre. It may be some kind of prop for an upcoming performance.

I regard my ghastly pale corpse-eating worm look-alike death mask in a sparkling neon display window, and I smile unkindly at this parody of human appearance, but what can a poor non-human being do? In one way or another, it is about melting into the existence and I hardly look worse than the gorgons of all kinds that heavily make down their raison d’être into total malformation or grope for new body parts to pierce and furnish with eardrops.

I stick out my right hand into the rain to feel my way. And when the radioactive drops hit my hand, the flesh melts away, running along the curb until it is sucked down in a whirlpool and disappears into a rotten drain to be forwarded out of existence through a yellow hole in a structure somewhere else. At the same time the yellow programme falls to the street. The now almost totally flesh-scraped bones of my fingers follow suit.

Captain Xavier Pascal realised that Lieutenant Sigourney Nagy had activated the sling and that the sling had passed through the head of the quantum player with its experience-creating teeth of induction. With a nervous look at his hand — it was still where it should be — he got to his feet and began to walk up and down the room.

A warm sense of innocence was running through the body of Xavier Pascal. He purred with content. The state of tension after the catastrophic meeting with Teresia Nightmare relaxed. The only thing left was to do was function as a tugboat, dragging the confounded nuisance back to the universe where it belonged.

When he discovered the yellow program, he stiffened for a second. It was rolled up on the floating desk of pasemite. One can never trust the slings. They work like generators of chance. Here a piece of his mental experience had spilled over into his primary existence in the form of a secondary dream object.

This object had been materialized in a tertiary way in its quaternary, nauseating yellow form. All rubbish about creating toothless quantum heads without any kinds of hallucinatory side effects of the character that persist in oscillating between existence and non-existence had up to then turned out to be... well, rubbish. In congruence with Schrödinger’s living-dead cat, objects that actually did not exist were existentialized, and existing things were de-existentialized into nothing — ad infinitum.

Dammit to hell!

Would the rolled-up program create problematic anomalies in his life or was its materialized non-existence negligible?

Suddenly, a blonde woman came walking out of nothingness, followed by a crawling man who seemed to kiss the spots where she had walked. Like a sudden breeze they traversed through his narrow cabin. The draft caused the yellow program to move, and then the couple disappeared through the wall.

Upset, Xavier Pascal put on his dirty space boots. He wrapped the uniform around his body and staggered out of his cabin. He was a brown asshole ready to live and die with dirty boots on.

Time to tow a kidnapped convent cum monastery.

Proceed to part 6...

Copyright © 2008 by Bertil Falk