Kingdom come

blazon.

“Good afternoon.”

Officer Derek came closer. “Something I can help you with?”

Officer Derek stopped with a big red-faced smile, a foot or two from Lucas.

Lucas shook his head. “Just a little stiff—” he said.

There was an instant, then, when Officer Derek was struck blind. Either that or he was simply blinking at an inopportune moment, or the event itself was too sudden for the refresh-rate of human vision. But the result was the side of Lucas’ hand arriving under Derek’s chin, sleek and hard as a knife, without any sense of its having traveled there. And Derek had only a split second to sense its presence before he was lying on his back. Even the sound of the events—the meat-on-meat noise of the strike itself, the whoosh of his fall, gravel crunching and scurrying—took a moment to catch up to his brain. As though he remembered the events afterward without having experienced them in the first place.

As the other agents advanced, Lucas whirled around the far side of the oxcart, out of sight. And before anyone could properly analyze this development, he reappeared, this time shooting out at ground-level from between the oxcart’s large wheels. The sound that followed, that of an unwitting young agent’s knee giving out sideways, made everyone freeze for a moment and wince, even Officer Derek, who had been struggling off his back.

“Shit,” said the disabled young man as he went down.

The rest of the agents now pounced, the steel toes of Lucas’ whirling boots catching one on the jaw, another in the sensitive tissue beneath the anus. Shortly the three remaining agents, all young men of Greco-Roman build, were laying down on Lucas with their batons, one under his chin and one on his bladder and one against his knees. As Lucas writhed, tiring, he got a gouge in the left eye of one agent, and a painful spoon-gouge beneath the sternum of another. They fell away with cries. But the hard weight against his throat stuck, and as daylight began to gray-over and swim, Lucas stopped convulsing.

At this time something that felt like a laser-thin icicle plunged into Lucas’ right buttock. The feeling that rushed behind it was not unlike the night-cap dose of Nulepsin D, like an unresponsive liquid rushing over his brain, partitioning his senses. Lucas up to find six men milling nearby, nursing various body parts, cursing and coughing, breathless. Two knelt on the road near him, wheezing and sighing. About twenty feet away stood Jacqueline and Padraig—he petrified, she teary and smiling, full of unformed glory.

Lucas looked at Padraig.

“Get home,” Lucas said, throaty, already a little deaf to his own speech.

Padraig nodded and ran. He jumped back in the truck. No agent was in the mood to pursue. Jacqueline stood still.

As they loaded Lucas onto the oxcart, Officer Derek was standing over him, an ice-pack to his chin. Lucas coughed numbly. He willed his mouth.

“If you do anything to her,” Lucas said. “I will kill all of you.”

Officer Derek nodded, wincing.

“Of course,” he said.

Lucas was asleep.

**
Here, is how Tot Maddock, mob consultant, sometime pornstar, and former entertainment representative of Hitch MacAbee came to be “Vice Regent” of Nevada (along with Idaho and North Arizona) under the newly-forming Satanist Republic currently titled: “The States Formerly-Known as the United States of America.”

When negotiations broke down between the Heads of State representing Planet Earth and those representing the Prince of Darkness, it was the moderators who were paying closest attention: It was the Vegas organized crime consortia who would rise to the occasion. Since then, their plans had advanced faster than Satan’s.

One of their first priorities was placing a made highly in the new Satanic government. Thus Tot Maddock was installed in Las Vegas as Vice Regent by a saleable city council. It was a position similar to what the Mayor of Washington D.C. once enjoyed. For Satan, in a loving and impassioned statement, had declared Las Vegas “Capital of Planet Earth.” It was the apprenticeship he had wanted for Jim Johns.

After the viceroyalty went to Tot Maddock, the Gaming Operators’ Counsel advised him to begin practicing the purity rituals of the Ancient Mosaic priesthood on a daily basis. Tot didn’t know why. But he knew that he would know, precisely when he needed to. The Counsel gave him a historically reconstructed diagram of the ablution rituals and directed him to several Old Testament passages, particularly Psalm 24, the “clean hands and pure heart” bit.

Tot practiced. The prayers made him feel like an idiot babbling to himself in an otherwise empty suite. The Operators’ Counsel, nonetheless, Tot believed in.
**
Satan got in contact with Jim Johns the Antichrist again that evening, this time in the person of two demonic enforcers, brothers named Harry and Gill, who were strong, of medium intelligence, in aspect something like patchy, underfed grizzly bears. They grabbed Jim Johns off the street while his friend Cerberus lingered in a convenience store: the dapper young man plying conversation on a Scandinavian attorney he met at the flavor center. The brothers dragged Jim Johns through an alley, then down the street and into a second alley, pinning him against a bulky green transformer. They made gruff sounds and said gruff things, like bad actors, more volume than emotion.

The Antichrist was not a big man. His hideous strength lay in charisma. So in order to hold the Antichrist down, Harry had to mash one hand over Jim Johns’ mouth and the other over his own eyes, so as not to be heartbroken by good looks or bedeviled with mind-poetry.

Thus situated, his brother Gill could read out the formal sentence.

“As long as hatred of self abides,” Gill said, “the penalty of sin abides.”

The Antichrist had already struggled part of his mouth free. “What the hell—”

Harry reapplied his hand, mooshing with imprecision Jim’s lips and nose. Harry was still blinding himself with the other furry mitt.

“No one is sure of the reality of his own contrition,” said Gill. “Much less of receiving plenary forgiveness.”

At this point the Antichrist bit into Harry’s long meaty fingers as hard as he could, mashing down till he heard joints uncouple. Gill looked up from the page as his brother howled, squeezing the offended hand to his face with the other, still trying to keep himself safe from the Man of Sin’s gaze. But the Antichrist wasn’t looking at the big demon kneeling on his legs and pelvis. He was looking at Gill.

“The “Ninety-Five Theses”?” the Antichrist said. “What am I, a fucking papist?”

Gill searched the page with little head jerks. He did not find the answer. The Antichrist glanced to Harry, now, who was sobbing, emitting liquids and strange sounds. The Antichrist looked back to Gill.

“Would you do something for me?”

Gill stood there a moment. He blinked.

“Sure.”

All at once Gill began to move. When he reached his snuffling brother he pulled him off, and Jim Johns kicked his legs free. Jim rolled up and stood, and was straightening his trench coat, stomping the sleep out of his feet, as Gill removed a long, rusty flail from its sleeve—a length of reinforced spear stock with a spiked steel ball or “morning star” dangling on a chain—and began savaging his brother with it. It made a slapping, rending-fabric sound where it landed, and Harry began to cry louder, waaa-a-a-a-a-a, as though for an unseen parent in a further room.

“Gill,” Gill said, catching his breath, before bringing the instrument down again like an ax.

The Antichrist put a hand on Gill’s shoulder, and the scourge froze.

“Thanks Gill—”

Then the Antichrist walked away.

Satan was hopeless, he realized. The New All-Harrowing Empire was stillborn. The demons had nothing to lose but their dread and stupidity. Satan would never find good help.

For his part, the demon named Gill now watched with reverence as Jim Johns made his way back to the light, hopping around a dumpster and disappearing again, still swatting at invisible alley grime. Gill found himself immobile, with a feeling that touched something far away in his earliest indefinite memories of God and heaven, like a dream irretrievable. The terrible admiration Gill could not name was of his first meeting with a gregarious pyrotechnician and social-climber called: Lucifer.

“Huh,” Gill said.

As was tackled by his brother.
Satan was spending less and less time in Vegas. The lake was too beautiful. The rocks were beautiful. The Mormons were beautiful. He shopped in the little marina. He dressed his bodyguards in cabana-wear. He ate Navaho cakes. He ate up relaxation. Satan had fallen in love with one of the older prostitutes that hung around the Imperial, QiQi Richards. An act of emotional desperation, and he should have known better than by any theological standard.

“I’ll never leave this place, QiQi—” he would tell her as they lounged in his large, subdivision home, air conditioner-cool. “I love it here. I love crazy Mormons. They never get mad, they never fucking swear. And I love to be bossed around, for some reason. I’m never going anywhere—”

Satan fretted up Jim John’s absence. He needed relaxation. He was going very soft. QiQi Richards had an innocent laugh. Oh my, she was fond of saying. Dear, dear. Her nightly arts were enhanced by contrast with this orchestrated primness in daylight. QiQi suggested on many occasions, nonetheless, sexual acts that Satan had simply never heard of. QiQi was old friends with Tot Tot Maddock.

Satan kept calling her “the whore who sits on many waters.”

For the first six years of his tenure, this President kept watch over a gently bubbling economy; a relative peace, as far as immediate national interests were concerned; and a resurgence of situation comedies based on stand-up material. And all this time—the digitally-framed newsheads would be huffing tonight, as they did every night—while the President enjoyed the esteem-by-association that accrues to a caretaker during a boon, as each week he anticipated Thursday night and the primetime power-bloc that accrued there with real, child’s excitement, dark forces were consolidating their resources, unconsidered and without impediment. Now, as history moved away hour upon hour from January 1, one nation after another was preemptively laying down its arms and declaring allegiance—annexation, more or less—to the newborn “Covenant of Autochthonous Satanist Republics.” The press had declined to report much of it. Mostly, the President guessed, out of disbelief.

The President was born in Venice, California, son of a respected actuary named Joseph and a plastic surgeon called Nan. The President discovered athletics at age two. By age three he could make seven of ten regulation free-throws on a full-sized basketball goal. When the President was fifteen and a half he was drafted by UCLA and had to finish what remained of his high school coursework during the following summers. At the end of his second star year as a Bruin, the Knicks drafted the President, and during off-seasons he worked steadily at finishing college and earning a law degree, partially through the mail.

After fifteen years in the NBA, the president had a family of two children and an attractive, simply-dressing wife, with hard, bobbed hair the color of an old penny. Upon his retirement from the league, the President opened an eponymous car dealership. Success was instant. The President prevailed in sales as in business as in basketball, with the careless charm of a man that believes in himself without any condition or particular consideration. But after three years in the auto business he was low, tired, and felt gutless. Neither an alcoholic nor a deadbeat, car sales seemed to involve more ethical and psychological contamination than the President really had to put up with. And when he entered the race for Neighborhood Advisory Commissioner, a sub-agency of the City Council of Los Angeles, it was mostly an attempt to lift his spirits, to renew his interest in his own life.

He sold his company, six dealerships, and took up the commissionership, a demanding and almost unpaid position, without care or particular knowledge of what he was commissioned to do. But it felt good. It felt the same eight years later when the President won the presidency, something he’d accomplished with similarly obscure motivations and the same thankful naiveté. This President had never lost an election.

Now he was a shambles. And became more so by the minute, as one report after another affirmed his inadequacy. From what the President could understand, it seemed his inability to deal with any new information was in most cases a result of his failure to deal with previous information. If nothing else, he knew better than to interfere with the more pressing decisions being made in the offices and hallways that encamped him.

He’d been awake since Saturday—four days. At this point the President saw and heard everything as though at a great height above himself, sounds muted, distorted and otherly, like voices from a bedside radio almost but not quite properly tuned to a station. At three A.M. Wednesday morning, however, all the lights were out in the office except for the President’s Tiffany desk lamp. And half-illuminated, thrown back in his desk chair as though impaled, the President lay blackly and dreamlessly unconscious.
“Apparently the President’s son Murray,” a female voice in a thick highland brogue had intoned over the World Service that afternoon,
was yesterday transmogrified into a large cement pier. The pier is about seventeen feet high and twenty-five tons, an object, says the White House, Americans might recognize from beneath a highway overpass.
In a related story, a highway overpass in northeastern Maryland, about fifteen miles from the Presidential residence, collapsed yesterday evening when eyewitnesses say one of its supports transmutated into a North American tufted titmouse in midflight. The titmouse is presumed—
The President snapped off the report at this point. He knew what it would say next.
Sources claim the President has cloistered himself in the Oval Office, mourning his afflicted son/pylon/titmouse. The bypass pier currently remains in the President’s dining room, where the President has strictly forbidden its removal...
And so on. All of which was true.
Murray had been an astrophysicist. Dumpy, late-sleeping and kind, he worked as an assistant professor in Annapolis, and at age thirty-two still resided in the President’s large home at Roan. Murray never adopted his father’s love of basketball nor his excessive comfort with the opposite sex. But the President always encouraged Murray in the unserious-sounding investigations that filled his time. Murray was the President’s youngest child and there was always a quiet geniality between them which the President found savingly wholesome.

Now all the auxiliary universes his son had taken so seriously menaced the President with their hugeness and unimaginable number. Not only couldn’t he guess where Murray ended up, the President had no idea in what sort of filial regard he was supposed to hold the bit of highway engineering that now presided over his dining area. If the President were the type to consider suicide, he would be considering it. But he wasn’t the type, and that may have been slightly worse—for instead, as the BBC reportress seemed somehow to guess, now the President was considering nothing.

“What is it now?” he hollered, the volume of own his voice making him wince.

This froze the young administrator where she stood.

“Good morning, Mr. President. I’m sorry to disturb you.”

“Morning,” he said, rubbing his eyelids and temples and scalp line. “It’s fine.”

“Sir,” said Carmen O’Shaughnessy, for that was the Chief-of-Staff’s name. “Something’s...happened.”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s wonderful news,” said the President. “What’s broken, what’s on fire, what’s missing?”

“The—” Carmen came a step nearer, hugging her clipboard. “Well, the Atlantic Fleet, it seems.”

The President was trying to squint and unsquint the sleep out of his face.

“Of what?”

“Of the United States Navy, sir.”

“It’s broken?”

“Mmm…” said Carmen. “We don’t really know.”

“On fire?”

“We don’t know that either, sir. Certainly it could be.”

The President scowled with all the sensation that an inadequate rest brings back. He looked up.

“Missing?”

“Yes, Mr. President. It’s missing.”

The President resumed scowling toward the floor, unwilling to greet the new information.

“This morning,” Carmen continued, “roughly 87,000 American sailors woke up at different points along the Atlantic Rim with little or no recollection of how they got there.”

The President continued to watch the floor. “Unharmed?”

“Except for some hypothermia, Mr. President. They were left with only their Naval-issue boxer briefs and guinea-Ts.”

The President tried to sigh or laugh, he didn’t know which, and it came out like a minor cough or heave.

“How about that.”

“These reports are preliminary,” said Carmen, “but it does seem that most of our sailors are amnesiac in one way or another as regards the last twelve hours.”

The President nodded.

“Fantastic.”

The President realized at this moment the real thing he had not been letting himself feel, the one most plentiful emotion he had been shielding from himself with exhaustion. And the Commander-in-Chief, in that moment, was heart-bustingly, life-endingly sad.

“Alright, Carmen,” he said finally, when his mind had cleared a little. “It’s alright. I can handle it.”

Carmen did nothing to confirm or deny this statement, but after a moment, cutting short an expanding silence, simply nodded and left. When she had gone, the President sat and contemplated the beginning of the glow of a sense that—for once—he knew what to do. And for the first time in weeks, the man smiled.

From Stull, Padraig drove to his hospital, Mercy General, to meet with a friend of his named Tim Chapman. Mercy General was skeleton-staffed: One ER doctor and two ER nurses, the neo-natal unit, the psych-ward, and the Counter-liability office were all the services fully functioning.

Here’s something obvious Padraig had come to recognize: That he would never, ever be good enough for his wife. That this had been the inevitable fact of their marriage all along, that their relationship was never even plausible. He turned into the Mercy General staff-lot with the lowest, windless sigh.

Padraig’s friend Tim Chapman was having a complicated day of his own. After entering the office, turning on his computer, and removing the previous day from his Roget II Word-a-Day desk calendar—“amensalism”—he’d gone to work, picking up the first of several suits that emerged since the End of the World became a topic of litigious concern. Mostly “sucker fish,” these were patients who appropriated a kind of therapy by pretending to be sick whenever they became sad or anxious, spending as many days in the hospital as needed until they felt properly existentially reassured. When the decision had been made to cease full operations at Mercy General, all of these patients found themselves evicted, this just as Endtime panic was rushing upon the national consciousness. Thus the only true and proper expression of hurt feelings in the modern day, vexatious litigation, had swelled.

The first few claims Tim dismissed easily, appending a summary deconstruction of each on a small yellow notecard. About case file #7864, Tim had noticed an odd fish-smell in his vicinity, along with a deadness in his right leg. He flexed the leg, thinking it had fallen asleep. It wasn’t till about ten minutes later that Tim attempted to refill his coffee cup. Unfortunately his right leg had transmutated into a four-foot Atlantic sturgeon.

Tim sat back down, hiding the leg from himself back beneath the desk. He didn’t look at it immediately. Suddenly the confessions and protestations of the dependent and psychically incomplete were all loud and simultaneously present in the office: they raced over him, haunting and auditory. He looked at the leg. The bill-like mouth of the fish came up to about his right thigh, jaws squeezed open onto the flesh, as though the creature had engorged the remainder of Tim’s leg. Tim noticed that it was laboring for breath, eyes wild and pained, little rainbowy tide pools swirling over their surfaces. Tim was an active fisherman, tournament-class, Professional Angler’s Association certified, and it did occur to him that some sort of recompense was being taken by a more universal fish consciousness. But Tim blinked that strange thought away. And sat for a moment in the absence of a more practical one.

The words entered Tim’s mind as though through the side-door of his brain. He looked down at the fish. At once he knew it was the source of the words, and for an embarrassing instant he had almost answered it aloud. Finally he said nothing.

Tim did as he was told. He instructed his toes—ones he did not know were there or not—to wiggle, and they did so, squirming against the sturgeon’s wet internal mechanics. His leg still existed, apparently, and it really had been engorged by this poor, misplaced, and currently dying animal. And in that moment Tim Chapman felt the need to apologize to it. And he was about to when office door cracked open.

“Knock knock—”

Tim looked up, slamming back under his desk. The soft, moon-ish face of Padraig Mitchell was smiling weakly from the doorway.

“Padraig,” Tim said, quavering.

“Hey,” Padraig said, beaten-sounding, breathy and sort of falsetto.

Padraig entered. While Tim watched in horror, Padraig proceeded to mosey across the office, fingering the top of a cabinet, touching Tim’s pictures, his executive centrifuge toy and so on. Finally he arrived in front of Tim’s desk and sat. Tim smiled in cloaked horror.

“Tim,” Padraig said.

Tim coughed. “Yes, hi, Padraig.”

“Sorry to bother you at work.”

Tim winced. He resituated with tiny movements.

“No bother,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m, uh...” Padraig scratched his head. “Actually, Tim, I’m thinking about a divorce.”

Tim nodded, leaning forward a bit. The word distracted him from the fish slightly, drawing him into more familiar professional territory.

“Divorce.”

“Yeah,” Padraig said. “You know something about divorce, right?”

“Sure, some,” Tim said. He scooted a little. “From Dyna?”

Padraig nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I want...You know, I want everything to go to her. Absolutely everything. And maybe a clause that says I have to roam the arctic wastes or something.”

Tim swiveled gingerly to his left-hand drawer.

“We can do that,” he said. “I didn’t know you two were having problems.”

“We’re separated, actually.”

Tim was digging in his drawer now.

“Is that so?”

“Yeah,” Padraig said.

With caution he pulled open the rambling index.

“What is?” Padraig said.

“The divorce petition.”

Padraig liked hearing the word “divorce” even less than saying it. There was also something malign or simply false in the word “petition.”

“Here it is,” Tim said, reaching for a pen. He began scrawling web addresses on a green Post-it. “Actually the only difference between a divorce and a limited divorce, or “separation,” is signing a piece of paper.”

“Ok,” Padraig said, sucking an involuntary breath that sounded like the first half of a sob. “As long as we can do it so Dyna’s taken care of forever,” he said. “And I just fall off the face of the planet or whatever.”

“Not a problem,” Tim said. “Common request.” He looked up, folding the Post-it over and laying it in front of his friend. He became austere. “Divorce between two people that don’t have kids,” Tim said, “is usually a very good thing.”

Padraig thought.

“Really?”

“Not that it isn’t difficult,” said Tim. “But I’ve done it with kids and without kids, and honestly I envy you right now. Your unborn future children will thank you.”

Padraig nodded. “I’m sure that’s right,” he said. He smelled something briny—

“Buddy, seriously.” Tim was smiling, his underwear cool and saturate—the fish panting against his leg, running out of life. “These things happen.”

Padraig thought about Dyna. The phone call. The Legos. The self-storage.

“You’re right.”

Tim nodded. “Yes I am.”

“Yes, you’re right. And I am right also.”

Padraig stood. Tim wasn’t listening.

“Okay then,” he said.

“If I don’t see you before the world ends, Tim—” Padraig looked around the office. Tim appeared very small, hunkered over by executive furniture and teetering file stacks. “You take care.”

“Will do,” Tim said.

Padraig winked. He went. The green Post-it rectangle remained on the desk, lined with numbers. Tim didn’t see it. He gave Padraig a moment to get down the hall before he got himself upright, grunting, using desk and chair and then filing cabinet and floorlamp for handholds. Tim hopped to the door, traveled chair-to-chair through the counter-liability lobby and into the main hall. He located a wheelchair nearby and got in. He rolled to the elevator and went up to the children’s floor. In a moment the sturgeon would torpedo unhindered again in the free-standing salt water aquarium in the children’s waiting area. But before Tim had hoisted himself up on the apparatus, he took a final moment to inspect the creature. Still the meaty, Herculean gills moved, like antique bellows, shredded with unusable air. Still the quiet, angry defiance blazed over the eyes.

“Please don’t be offended if I mash or kick you,” Tim said. His voice lost itself in the dim hallways.

Assuming he had the fish’s blessing, Tim locked the wheelchair wheels and got himself upright on one leg. He squirmed the top half of his body onto the aquarium and, opening a lid door on the opposing side, inundated the animal, the saltwater within slapping angrily at its boundaries. The half-straddle was just secure enough that Tim could keep upright without being comfortable. But he held on. The fish was submerged now, and gently Tim began easing the animal’s nose back off his thigh—

Again pure meaning appeared in Tim’s mind as though from an adjacent universe.

“Alright,” Tim said.

There was silence again. Tim looked down to make sure the creature was still drawing breath. The breaths were stronger now, engine-ish.

“Ah—”Tim said, sighing. “Sorry.”

He did so. And almost instantly the creature was wiggling back. It budged once, and then again until all of the thigh was exposed. Then, once the knee escaped, Tim’s leg slid out of the fish’s gullet in one motion. Chummy slime spread down in the water, messy as a birth, and as Tim climbed down off the aquarium the sturgeon torqued away ruggedly—honor salvaged.

Tim sat back in his chair and watched over it awhile. He was soaked. He smelled funny. The fish had already assumed its manly, bottom-hugging patrol. Tim looked at his leg, sighing. The pantleg was shredded, slick with fish fluid. Tim thought of Dyna Mitchell. He called his wife.

Padraig drove toward Peerless Self-Storage in a happy, trembling haste.

“I,” he announced to the empty cab of his pick-up, clearing his throat, “was wrong...”

The statement stuck in his throat. He had to force the muscles there to allow the words. For in Padraig’s case, with his body dysmorphic tendencies, humility posed a physical problem.

“...To doubt myself,” he said.

He laughed.