What Would Satan Do_ - Anthony Miller [17]
“What? Position to do what?”
“I’m not sure. Whatever it is, it’s not good.”
They watched in silence for a moment.
“Wouldn’t it be cool,” asked Raju, “if there was one of those locust clouds right now, and they ate the president?”
“What?” asked Liam.
“Who?” asked Festus.
“Locusts! The president!” Raju pointed to the screen. “They eat him up.” He put his fingers to the sides of his mouth to demonstrate locust mastication.
“He’s the governor,” said Liam.
“Whatever,” said Raju. “It would be cool, and you know it.”
“Yeah,” said Festus. “Or maybe some frogs. That would be so—”
Raju jumped off the couch and levitated, Scooby-Doo style as he pointed to the screen. “Holy shit, dude! It’s bugs!”
On the screen, the picture of Dick Whitford cut away to the hair-helmet woman. She expressed some uncertainty as to the exact nature of what was transpiring at the Governor’s press conference. Over her shoulder, the little screen-within-a-screen showed the Governor flailing and waving his hands wildly, and then being ushered off the stage.
“It’s bugs!” said Raju. “They’re there. Right now! Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit!”
“Calm down,” said Festus. “It’s not bugs.” He leaned in for a closer look. “It’s not—” He squinted, leaned even closer, and then touched the television screen as if that would help. “Wait a minute. I think it might be…” He turned to look at Liam, but Liam had stood up and was headed out of the room.
“Liam?” said Festus. Raju turned to see what the hell was wrong with Liam that he didn’t want to stay and watch the Governor get eaten by a swarm of locusts.
“I’ll be up front,” said Liam. “Got some … guitar stuff to take care of.”
Chapter 7. Shirley Is a Merciless, Automaton Whore
Washington, D.C. is a crappy place to live. Sure, the monuments and museums are nice, and the idea of tooling around a city that occupies the top spot on Russia’s list of “Cities to Pulverize and Obliterate with Nuclear Weapons” is cool, but actually living (or trying to live) in the Nation’s Capital sucks. One of the main problems is the climate.
For most of the United States, climatologists use labels like “temperate” or “subtropical,” but for D.C., they had to carve out a special and unique zone called “Ass.” The problem is that the Founding Fathers decided that the best place to build the capital was a swamp, which in terms of city planning is just one, small step away from actually building a city under water. All that moisture in the air acts like a multiplier for temperature, except that it somehow works both ways. When it’s hot, the humidity makes it hotter. When it’s cold, the humidity makes it ass-tastically cold – hence the climatologists’ nomenclature.
The Devil was in a foul mood. He held the telephone at arm’s length. “Do you understand that I am, at this very moment, freezing to death?!”
Shirley — the telephone representative for Washington Gas — may have understood, but she was not at all sympathetic to the Devil’s plight, which is to say that she was acting like an unfeeling, robot bitch as she followed a diagrammatic flow chart of scripted answers with about as much empathy for his misery and discomfort as a washing machine has for clothing as it cycles from soak to agitate to rinse to spin.
No, Shirley didn’t seem to care anymore than his thermostat did. And yelling at her wasn’t helping any more than it had with that. Satan had screamed at and berated the little box on the wall off and on for two days before his neighbor had knocked on the door, wondering what all the fuss was about. The neighbor had explained the mysteries of climate control, and had eventually helped Satan to figure out that the gas wasn’t working. So now here he was, on the phone with this merciless, automaton whore.
“I’m sorry, sir, but if you want to place a service order, you need to call us three days in advance,” she said. This was the fifth time she had advised the Devil of Washington Gas’ three-day notice requirement. Of course, Shirley had no idea that