Apocalypse for a Dissociated Creator

by Bertil Falk

6. The Sixth Catch

It was rather cramped, like Hell, in the catacombs, which wound through the universe like a spatial sewer system. And the Mope found that her reality was becoming more and more fragmented. The death of Urbanus Collectus had been a heavy blow to her.

The prudish young man, who once had been sent to her and whom she had come to take for granted, had proved to be nearly irreplaceable. Scarcely had his body been lowered into the quiet hole the celibateurs had dug down to the worms inside the cloister in Rome than the tasks he had always carried out to her satisfaction either fizzled out or were beset with problems difficult to overcome.

She picked up the hairy book that had fallen from the hands of the dragon man on the emerald-green centipede. She opened the cover and turned the leaves. Empty words, nothing else. And this was the end station of concentrated evil. There Adolf was, forever fettered to Charles, and they were being gassed over and over again and were burning in one of the ovens. The Devil courteously thanked Adolf for improving the facilities of the final station.

The Mahatma sat in a corner with Marilyn on his knees. Someone who just had arrived kneeled to Satan and prayed sincerely: “I want the same punishment as Gandhiji,” but the Devil sadistically shook his heads so that his horns spat excrement. “No, it’s not possible,” he said, wringing his talons. “That is not the Mahatma’s punishment; that is Miss Monroe’s punishment.”

All the minor devils guffawed uncontrollably at this classic from 20th-century Hindustan, though they had heard it hundreds of times before. New trains were constantly arriving at the platform of the final station. The name of the station: SEMBLANCE COSMOS, was called out through the loudspeakers; the trains were emptied; priests and aytollahs and swamis went up in smoke. Meadows of flourishing evil spread expansively with snake-entwined poppies inspected by Baudelaire and Ducasse. Café Flame was never evacuated. Like spectres, levelers and printers came and went. The styli rasped the vinyl of Chasing the Bird, the printing office basked in the sun like a transparent castle in a blizzard.

Silence is a blunt instrument.

Inconsolably, the skeleton of a red rose dreamed in the office. A teenager discovered that the world is evil. The enormous earthworm — with a circumference of fifteen meters — was eating new tunnels under the catacombs, which were being demolished. The man from Cassiopeia, himself a monster, let the monster have its way.

The Vatican was on the spot. The curia would hold a meeting. The rocket pilots prepared themselves. When the spacecraft rose with booming rockets from the international cosmodrome of Eternity, they slit the throats of all the passengers and threw the pilots alive into space.

In the Rose Garden of the Bureau for Assuring the Salvation of Newly Discovered Mankinds, it was discussed whether enough humanness could be attached to hundred-meter long earthworms with a diameter of ten to fifteen meters for them to be considered salvationable. The question was only partly analyzed. Mother Saulcerite, who had placed it on the agenda, was yanked away to the Vatican before she was able to finalize the investigation.

Advocatus Diaboli was irritated. It was his task to follow the commission, to inspect it visually and give his opinion. Should the earthworm problem be ignored or would it open a new way to either salvation? Or, yes, that other thing that was whispered about in unmistakable terms.

Existence, a word that could be analyzed linguistically but in terms of content eluded all models of explanation, tested all its possibilities. The Last Judgment occurs on the day when Nature has created all the faces that can be created. On that day — when nature would be forced to start over from the beginning and make all the same faces again — it would all be over.

Now one could go out onto the street and be amazed at the possibilities of forming a recognizable face with just ears, noses, mouths, eyes, heads, foreheads etc. All would be similarly structured but even so fully distinguishable. And on top of that were all the other mankinds with double noses, sevenfold eyes and noselessness, and that expands the possibilities a billionfold. In sum, all the appearances that had been formed ever since the Creator set the carousel in motion.

The barrier at Altair was a galactic gate hindering all arrivals. The excitement was great now that the bar would be raised and the gate opened.

A transparent nun from Gutta tried gelatinously to raise the bar, but her strength was of no avail. Her sisters had to assist her. Against the background of NGC 6709, a planetary nebula and a crowd of applauding enthusiasts raised the bar. And it was total night with darkening suns and bleeding satellites.

Yes, through the window that hung and swung like a stray picture nailed to the firmament, which seemed about to collapse, they saw the yellow sun turn black and change into a hair follicle. A heavenquake shook the foundation of Existence.

When the ceiling and, consequently, the roof cracked, one could see the pale-white moon had been turned into a bleeding spot in the heavens, which turned pale and were covered with all kinds of luminous heavenly bodies that fell and fell in a perpetual rain of stars.

A gale of wind traversed Existence, and the world tree standing unperturbed in the midst of reality was shaken, and its leaves began to fall as did its apples, figs, and apricots.

And when the gate was opened, a limping little balloon man stepped back and forth and whistled, and there was a season for playing marbles and hopscotch and plucking up courage, and the lame balloon man held in his hand all the strings that ended in multi-colored star clusters, which strained upwards towards eternity’s ground-swell of sadness. And of course, everything will be better when spring is here. It will be better this spring!

In a haze of jokes, a transparent nun chuckled in the direction of God, who demonstrated his humor. Saint Bradburius had said that the proof that God has a sense of humor could be seen in his creations: the shrew mouse, the camel, the ostrich and the humans! He could have added transparent guttas, and reptiles from Galatrism.

And the opening of the Gate uncovered all veins and arteries and aortas and bleeding catacombs and caves emptied of all frightened ones, who rushed down into the network of subways as the sirens hooted and the Blitz set in. And one roared that it is Spring in our Existence, that everything should thaw out and that we should love one another as we love ourselves and do to our neighbors, not what we want them to do us, but what they want us to do them. That is different, isn’t it? And in that way the overrated Golden Rule becomes less egocentric, so to speak.

In this carnival-like hullabaloo at Rigel, all directions spread without touching each other, since they incontrovertibly wound up beyond each other’s indescribable event horizons with their bizarre chipotle sausages, which only have one end, not two. Walls and hyacinths, flower beds and roses, jasper and sapphire, chalcedony and emerald, sardonyx and agate, chrysolite and beryl, topaz and chrysoprase and amethyst. Oh, apostolic oracles!

The rockets annihilated Rome. St. Peter’s Basilica was one big hole in the ground, but like a miracle of miracles Petrus stood unharmed in the ruins like a sign of another current than that of evil.

And evening and morning were the sixth day of Mother Saulcerite’s pontificate.

Proceed to part 7...