Pallets From Heaven


It's been awhile since I talked to George W., mostly because he seems pretty testy, considering the firepower at his disposal. If you still feel defensive when everybody else can go to hell while you're in a mineshaft elevator finally having that drink, you're an incorrigible megalomaniac. But one has to make an effort, so by means of psychic sophistry I traveled to the streets of Washington, D.C., where W's antiChrist, M, is on the prowl.

Okay, I admit it's an obvious device, to turn W on his head and make an M of him. Normally I wouldn't pander to superstition that way, but I just heard about a town in Louisiana where people are changing their area code from 666 because somewhere in the Bible the number is given as the "mark of the beast." Actually I think that's out of context, and it referred more specifically to the beast in man, or the connection of man to his animal nature.

This would normally be harmless enough information, sort of like saying that a certain number is a secret code for atavistic regression in the population, as for example substituting superstition for logic. But it always gets press, just like those people who saw the leprechaun in the tree. So to broaden my appeal I like to throw in semantic and numerological devices.

They haven't got much to do with real teleportation, though.

The really difficult part is the muscle that can suddenly contract the nut sack upward like an elevator on steroids. Should this muscle suddenly contract with the force of a charley horse there would be a crack like a rifle shot, followed by wailings and lamentations.

It's a dangerous game, moving in and out of the land of the dead.

Did M care about such dangers? "Not on your life, Pedro," he said, warming his blackened hands over a barrel fire.

"But that really is you, isn't it, Mr. President?"

He squinted over at me. "No," he said, "I'm not him, I'm M, the janitor."

"You sure do look like him. Except for being black, you know. You're a janitor?"

"The fixer, the clean up man. Somebody has to carry all the earthy things discarded by people on their way to heaven."

"I like that. Do you mind if I use it?"

"Go right ahead." He put an index finger to his left nostril and blew his nose into the barrel. He did it with an easy grace and hardly any residue, though for appearances he passed his nose lightly over the sleeve of his seedy overcoat. "Every night I try to talk to him while he's doing his evening meditation, but he's too busy repeating a mantra."

"What is his mantra?"

"'Consistency.' He repeats it over and over and he says it the same way every time."

"You going to see him tonight?"

"Every night, Pedro. I have to at least try to get past the hobgoblins."

I followed him along bleak streets where black men, like M, hovered around trash barrel fires like ghosts in the night, a vast underclass of invisible people, invisible to the unemployment statistics and to eyes always focused upward. To find them you have to stumble onto the entrance to their underground, maybe through a loose grating, into a cave underneath the street, a place lit by fires casting flickering shadows across faces deadened by hopelessness.

We passed gradually out of the ruined and abandoned city centers ruled by a listless surrender to music and drugs and violence. We passed through mixed neighborhoods, transitioning up or down in their attractiveness to investment and social life.

Finally we came through areas of gated mansions and skyscrapers with doormen and security guards, until at last we made our way to the government center, and the White House. Fortunately almost all the defenses around the White House are faced outward, anticipating confrontation with the waking world. There are of course psychic defenses, put in place by contract with Psychic T.V. But as is customary with administration contracts, the services are imaginary.

About the only thing I saw they'd installed was a big portrait of Sylvia Browne with motion detector eyes that light up and follow you when you come down the hallway to a secret room, forbidden even to Dick Cheney, in which W sits like Portnoy's father, wide stanced, with the maya of illusion growing from his navel like Kudzu vine.

M wasn't impressed, even with the gold faucets and heated towel rack. "What are you doing?" he asked, "sitting there making mudras and listening to the sound of one hand clapping while the economy collapses like an aging pyramid scheme?"

But W didn't even blink. "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the tyranny of evil men," he said evenly. His face reddened as he strained to rid himself of an accumulated darkness.

"We got to talk," M insisted. "Every time you stop doing something completely I have to take it over. I'm drinking and smoking and gambling, living like a hobo, carrying all your discarded humanity. Can't you try moderation?"

"I'm too close to heaven for that sort of thing."

"Washed in the blood of the lamb?" M asked.

"I'm avoiding lamb right now, and garbanzo beans ... I just flew in from Israel, and boy, are my alms tired." He took a wider stance and fixed M with a look of irritation. "Who are you tonight? The war dead or the missing emails?"

"Tonight I'm the Ponzi scheme housing market collapsing around you. What are you gonna do next? Shrink wrap cash on construction pallets and drop them from the sky to stimulate the economy?"

Suddenly W brightened. "What a great idea, much faster than tax rebates, and we've already worked out the logistics in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it's not like actual physical services that you can't fake."

"You can always print more money?"

"All it takes is a phone call to BEP."

Posted: Wed - January 23, 2008 at 11:41 AM