Satan Loves You

Satan had had a long day. First, he’d had to secure five thousand gallons of liquid feces, which he’d finally managed to find in a contaminated hog lagoon in Western Virginia.

“And that EPA comes down here to my business that’s been here for thirty years and they tell me that I’m killing my neighbors. What the hell do they know about my neighbors?” the owner of the hog lagoon that was, indeed, killing his neighbors, said. “If I was killing my neighbors, don’t you think somebody’d’ve said something by now? By the way, what the hell you want five thousand gallons of pig feces for?”

“We heat it to boiling and sort of put it in this big lake, then we take the souls of the damned and dip them in it for all eternity.”

The hog lagoon owner stared at him.

“It’s an everlasting torment,” Satan said. “For the damned.”

“And that’s your business,” the owner said. “You get the EPA meddling with you? No, sir, you don’t. But I do. Tain’t the America I grew up in, I’ll tell you that for free. You want a receipt?”

“Please.”

Then Maryland Sulfur and Steel, who sold him discount sulfur, refused his check.

“What do you mean?”

“The last one bounced.”

“This one won’t.”

“I’ve got a note from my boss right here. It says: DNAC. That means, Do Not Accept Checks.”

“Look, if you sell me this load of sulfur now I can pay you the balance we owe, plus the bank fee for the bounced check.”

“How?”

“With a check?”

Now he’d have to find some other source of sulfur. Maybe they could use rancid garbage instead. No, he probably couldn’t afford that either.

Depressed, Satan made his way to the nearest airport and then down the escalator to Hell. The escalator to Hell was one of Satan’s lesser ideas. He hadn’t been sold on elevators when they’d first come out and escalators had seemed much safer and more reliable. Also he had been worried that if he’d installed elevators it would only be a matter of time before people started calling them “Hellevators” and while he admired innovation he hated cute nicknames. So he’d had escalators put in. At the time, they had looked like the future but now, over one hundred years later, getting to Hell took forever. By the time Satan reached Hell’s Vestibule he was exhausted, he was irritable, he had no sulfur and the bank account for daily expenses was approaching zero.

Hell’s Vestibule was hot and noisy and huge, an endless cavern that lay underneath the planet’s crust. Occasionally an explorer would break through the ceiling and then scurry back to the surface to spread rumors about a hollow Earth, or a lost civilization deep within the planet’s core. But really, this was just the staging area for Hell, and it needed to be big because Hell was gruesomely inefficient.

In the Vestibule, demons were rolled about on scaffolding towers that spired up for hundreds of feet to the rocky ceiling. Symbols were spray painted there, circles and crosses and arrows and squiggles, like something a road crew would slap on the pavement to locate power cables and gas lines before digging up the street. The demons clambered up their precarious scaffolding perches and argued over the symbols, occasionally slapping one another, sometimes shoving one of their brethren off, sending them plunging to the ground. The demons arguing on the tiny, swaying platforms would eventually reach some sort of consensus and then haul up powerful jackhammers and rip holes in the ceiling. Out of these holes they would pull the souls of the damned from their graves. The souls, rubbery and weak, would be tossed from claw to claw down the scaffolding towers, finally arriving, dizzy and confused on the ground where demons with clipboards and bullhorns would bully them into endless, slow-moving lines. The souls would shuffle forward, stop, shuffle forward, stop, taking months to get from one end of the Vestibule to the other. And at the end of their journey, when they finally reached the Gates of Hell, they would be processed. Most of them spent the entire time complaining.

“Those of ya with big ‘V’s,” Minos shouted into his bullhorn. “Unfortunately, you’re the violent and you’ll be spending eternity inna fast-flowing riverra blood.”

A grumble went up.

“I doan wanna hear it. Now come on, hold up ya ‘V’s, if we can’t see ‘em we can’t process ya. You wanna stand around in this cavern for another six weeks?”

“Yes,” some wag shouted.

“Who said that?” Minos barked. A few rough-looking demons dragged a young man out of line. “Nail his feet ta the floor. He’s gonna be in this room for eternity.”

“Excuse me,” a man in a very ugly sweater said. “Will we be given an opportunity to change clothes?”

“What you were wearing when you were buried is what you’ll be wearing for eternity!” Minos barked.

“But I hate this sweater,” the man said.

“Shaddap!” Minos roared.

The man turned to the woman standing behind him.

“My wife knew I hated this sweater. She did this to me out of spite. Who gets buried in a sweater?”

“I’m crying on the inside for you, really,” the woman said. She was naked and her skin was bruised and torn. “I went over to borrow an extension cord from my quiet neighbor who kept to himself and now I’m buried underneath his tool shed. No one ever found my body. And it’s freezing in here. I’d give anything for a sweater.”

“You can have mine,” the man said.

“No trades!” a passing demon growled, stabbing Sweater Man in the back of the head with a trident.

Satan tried to make it through the Vestibule without attracting any attention, but Minos suddenly sprang up out of nowhere.

“Hey, Boss,” he said. “Any sulfur? We’re running low.”

“It should be coming,” Satan said.“Later.”

“Not ta be cheeky, boss, but that means never, don’t it?”

“You’re just going to have to make do,” Satan said.

“That’s gonna be difficult. Because the only thing that smells like sulfur is sulfur. We’re known for our sulfury smell, and to get that smell we need sulfur.”

“We don’t have any,” Satan snapped. “If you want it that bad, then take up a collection and buy it yourselves.”

“Um, okay,” Minos said. “Also, um, we need ta get the gas lines cleaned. A lotta the fires been goin’ out.”

“Can’t you get a squad of demons to clean them?”

“Those lines’re pretty twisty. Ya need ta get in a professional.”

“We just had them done.”

“About two hundred years ago. They’ve got ta be cleaned out every hundred years, but fifty years is even better,” Minos said.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Satan said. “We don’t have the money so you’re just going to have to find a way to function with dirty gas lines.”

“But dat’s the thing we’re second best known for,” Minos said. “Our flickering hellfire. It’s pathetic for a buncha jerks ta come in here and the first thing they see is unlit caverns wid no flickerin’ hellish flames.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Satan said, and then he ducked through a crowd of damned souls and darted into a tunnel before Minos could tell him about more things that were falling apart.

On the way to his office, Satan was accosted at least a dozen times: was more liquefied feces on the way? When was the announcement going out about the “Flogging & Flaying: Important Differences for Field Practitioners” workshop? Could they devise new punishments for the suicide bombers to differentiate them better from traditional suicides? Rats? Why did the rats keep vanishing? Were the goblins eating them again? Or was it the giants, who loved squashing them with rocks? Who was going to tear the flesh of the faithless if they didn’t have any rats?

It took Satan an hour to get to his office and the entire time it was nonstop questions, questions, questions. By the time he dragged himself through his office door, he felt like he was full of lead. He left the lights off, felt his way around his desk and sunk down into his chair. It was peaceful in the dark. It was quiet. It was calm. He thought about massaging his forehead again.

“Yo,” someone said. “What does it take to get some Bronson up in here?”

Satan squealed and fell over backwards. Grabbing at his desk he managed to switch on the lamp and saw something horrible sitting Indian style in the interview chair across from him. It was vaguely human but what human would claim this thing as its child? Its jeans were tight, and clung to its stick-like legs. Around its concave chest was draped a baggy, waist-length cardigan and a v-necked t-shirt with its own face airbrushed onto it. And that face! Hideous beyond measure! Its hair hung in dry, frizzy sheets to its shoulders, and out of it crawled two bushy sideburns that dragged themselves down across its cheeks until they met over this thing’s upper lip. There were piercings in its chin and tongue and from its entire body radiated a sense of unsettling emptiness. It was all style and no substance, a human broadcast antenna for the latest fads, a toxic hole in Creation. It was unclean. It was unreal. It was unholy. Ironically, it threw a gang sign.

Satan screamed.

“Sir, what is - ?” Nero burst in and saw what was in the chair and he froze in horror. “A hipster,” he gasped.

There are some who say that hipsters are young, recently-settled urban middle class adults or older teenagers with interests in non-mainstream fashion and culture. There are others who say they are scum-sucking crybabies from the bowels of Hell. Those who have been to the bowels of Hell know a harder truth: hipsters are the pollution of eternity.

Every particle in Creation has an associated antiparticle with the same mass, but an opposite electrical charge. There are neutrons and antineutrons, protons and antiprotons, matter and antimatter, gravity and antigravity. There are sentient beings and then there are hipsters. Just as matter and antimatter brought into contact will annihilate each other, so too will conscious, rational life and the hipster destroy each other if they are forced to share the same space. Hipsters hate work, passion, duty, honor, loyalty and anything that requires time, dedication or commitment. They embrace crappy beers like Pabst Blue Ribbon, they love crappy bands like Vampire Weekend, crappy sports like kickball and crappy furniture. They tell themselves that their love of these things is ironic, but love is love and how long can you pretend to love something before you debase the very notion of love?

In their passionate embrace of all that is meaningless, in their insistence on inserting irony into every facet of their lives, in their mindless worship of the cheap and shoddy, hipsters negate all that they touch. Worse than that, they have no souls. When a hipster dies their body is taken back to their hometown where they are stripped of their Eighties retro finery by heartbroken parents, their nineteenth century facial hair is shaved off, their labial piercings are removed and placed in a yellowed envelope with their baby teeth, and their aggressively meaningless tattoos are hidden beneath a thick layer of morticians make-up. Their parents assume that as difficult as its body is to deal with, the hipster’s soul has already moved on to a happier place. Those in the death business know otherwise. Long ago, the constant, sneering contempt hipsters have for those deemed less cool than themselves (read: everybody) microwaved their souls into tiny dried husks that rattle around inside them like old beans. When a hipster dies, he or she simply ceases to exist. In life: they helplessly hump every passing trend. In death: nothing.

For creatures of pure soul, like the dead, or those who stand close to the roots of Creation, like Satan, the hipster is a cosmic finger in the eye, an aberration that makes the Universe want to vomit. A hipster penetrating one of the spiritual realms feels as vile as a neo-Nazi penetrating a Holocaust memorial service. It is wrong, and the reaction is often a sudden, spontaneous spasm of violence.

Nero picked up a folding chair and began to beat the awful thing.

“Not cool!” the hipster squealed. “So not cool!”

“It’s getting away,” Satan said as the hipster covered its head with wristband-encrusted wrists and tried to scurry around Nero. Satan threw his lamp at it, cutting off its escape. Nero summoned all his courage and tackled the scrawny, shapeless thing, and the two of them rolled into the corner, looking like a beach ball wrestling a piece of string.

“Hurting! Me!” the hipster shouted as it struggled.

Satan picked up his phone and dialed.

“Yo!” Enar said.

“Enar,” Satan said. “You sent me a hipster.”

“The kid’s already there? Great! Have you heard his demo yet?”

“I’m very upset, Enar.”

“Yeah,” Enar said. “Whatever you do, don’t let him play you track two. It’s terrible.”

“I’m very upset you sent me a hipster.”

“It’s what all the kids are into these days. You and me, we’re old guys, we don’t understand. This kid, he’s from Bushwick.”

In the background, the hipster was trying to bite Nero.

“Get away, you nasty thing!” Nero said, kicking it.

“I want you to send me someone normal,” Satan said.

“Normal for what?” Enar asked. “Go down to Williamsburg and that’s all you see. Check out Silverlake and this guy is about average. Come on, he’s my sister’s kid. Help me out.”

“You don’t understand,” Satan said. “I can’t send this thing out as a representative of Hell. We’ll be a laughing stock.”

“Laughter is the best medicine,” Enar said.

“No,” Satan said. “It’s the worst medicine. In fact, it’s not even a medicine at all. I want to return your hipster.”

“I can’t really let you do that,” Enar said. “Look, you don’t want the hipster. I understand. There’s not a lot of patience for his brand in my sister’s house, either. But the fact is, he signed the contract. Right now, he’s all you’ve got. I can try to find someone with a more mainstream look but right this minute no one comes to mind, and it’s going to take me a while to sort through the options. And you know what the song says, ‘If you can’t be with the one you love/Love the one you’re with.’ Which, in this case, is my sister’s kid.”

Satan moaned in spiritual pain.

“The second I know something, I’ll be calling you,” Enar said, and hung up.

Satan slammed down the phone.

“I just want to go to the bathroom,” the hipster whined. “Is that OKAY?”

Nero lowered his guard for a second, but that was all it took. The hipster kicked him in the shins and made for the door. Satan tackled him and they went down in a heap. Lying on top of the wriggling sack of pale, jelloid flesh made him feel sick. The hipster had no bones, no muscles, no form or structure, he was just a pale skinbag covered in hair and ironic tattoos.

“I’ve got its feet,” Nero said.

Satan found that he was holding two limp tentacles that must be its arms.

“I’ve got its arms,” he said. “Now what do we do with it?”

“Here,” Nero said, dragging it towards the garbage can. “We’ll put it in a garbage bag and drown it in the Acheron.”

“Right,” Satan said.

“We’ll have to double bag it,” Nero said.

“Let go of me, you gaylords,” the hipster squealed.

The phone rang.

“Ignore it,” Satan said.

In one swift motion Nero grabbed the trashcan liner and pulled it up around the hipster’s legs.

“Now cram him in,” he said.

The phone stopped ringing.

Satan tried to shove the hipster into the trashcan liner.

“Don’t make me go Cobra Kai on your ass,” the hipster blustered.

They kept cramming. The intercom on Satan’s desk buzzed. It buzzed again. It began buzzing in an annoying staccato rhythm, but they ignored it and kept shoving. The bag was up to the hipster’s skinny waist by now, its two noodle-like legs folded up underneath it.

“You dudes suck,” the hipster whined.

The desk phone began to ring again and finally Satan couldn’t take it anymore. He grabbed it, and in that moment the hipster squirmed away.

“Sir!” Nero cried.

The hipster was almost at the door, one foot dragging the trashcan liner, when Satan hurled the office phone, striking it in the head. The boneless thing went down, bonelessly. All business, Satan and Nero stuffed it back into the garbage bag.

“I think it broke my skin,” Nero said, examining his arm where the hipster had bit him.

Suddenly, the door burst open and a flock of fat, giggling cherubim fluttered through. They knocked into one another, they plowed into the ceiling and they bumped into the walls. Nero tried to swat them away from his face. One of them landed on Satan’s desk and stood up on its fat little legs, pulled out a horn and tootled on it.

They began to sing in their lisping, eerie voices.

“You’re wanted...you’re wanted...you’re waaanted...” they warbled, “In...Heeeaveeeennnnn!”

It was the big finish. They began to fly around lazily on their backs, pulling lyres out of their sagging diapers and strumming them, blowing meaningless little pootles of noise on their tiny trumpets, shaking golden tambourines to different rhythms. The one on the desk threw up.

“I suppose we should have answered the phone,” Nero said, as they fled the office.