Beata Beertrice

The Keeper of Books

            “The used book business is not the kind of business where you’re going to get rich,” Father Satan said to me. “People come into the store, and, sure, they want books ... but with illustrations, with photographs.  Or, they want books about television or films.  Not me: I keep with books that have words you can read, yeah, maybe a few illustrations, but I want a read and it had better be a damn good read.  When other people would watch television when I was growing up, I would be reading a book.  Movies and television bore me: They’re boring, they’re just boring.”

Father Satan smacked his lips as if he has just tasted his first cup of coffee of the day.  “I just can’t see movies or television,” he said.  “No, I just can’t see them.”  Then, he patted a book with the title Night of the Auto-da-fé that rested on the glass counter.

            Listening to his routine of the day, I thought he was just trying to justify his existence working at a minimum-wage, no-benefits salesclerk job during another day of sour sales at Printers Devil Bookstore.  Certainly not in character with his recent metaphysical promotion, as ordained by The Baby Jesus.

            “You could always work on The Baby Jesus to pump up sales,” I said. “Tell him you’ll cut him a deal on hardbacks.”

            “A socialist hero who won’t keep paperbacks for the working class on his shelf,” Father Satan snorted. “No collected works of Marx in a paperback edition for him.  Not even trade paperback.  Nothing but bourgeois hardbacks for this guy of the revolution.”

Scenes from the Inquisition, Part I

            A Sheet of the Damned in a Most Holy Book of Paperback States:  He, Evan Willman, stands trial herein for alleged acts of grievous hypocrisy, overt malfeasance, intellectual browbeating, and defaming the Most Holy Books of Paperback.

His day of reckoning was at hand: Here Evan Willman stood, before his judge, the Inquisitor that Evan Willman had publicly denounced and branded as Father Satan.

            All the ponderance of historical and religious and moral knowledge Evan Willman had gained over the days, the months, the years through his studies of radical—though some deemed it heretical—theology must now be weighed on the scales of Inquisitorial justice.

For He Shall Evermore Be Known as Father Satan

            Evan Willman assumed the characteristic position he favored on the side patio of the Café Noir coffeeshop: stretched out on the molded outdoor plastic chair, hairless chest open to the sun, khaki shorts barely reaching over his finely tanned thighs.  He read his book as mirrored aviator sunglasses that shielded his eyes reflected the pages of text.  From time to time, he coolly removed a burning cigarette from the notch on the black plastic ashtray on the table next to him and took a marked drag, then he replaced the cigarette exactly into the notch, sipped from his cup of coffee, and turned a page over in his book.

            No question, the book was a hardback.  Marxist Show Trials: A History.

            He appeared content, satisfied in this pose.  Satisfied to loll in his casual sun-touched ritual: tanning, book, cigarette, coffee, tanning, book, cigarette, coffee, and so on and on and on.

            Little did Evan Willman know, however, that, on this particularly hot, steaming Sunday, he was about to enter into the opening act of a divine comedy.

            The keeper of books wheeled his beat-up urban street bike over toward the table and parked it against a tree ... then he just stood there, looking over Evan Willman.  Staring at him hard, a slight crease of a sneer on the corner of his thick lips.  After a few moments of silence holding this pose, he combed a strand of his long hair over his left ear with his fingers and said:

            “So, what’s the word, Baby Jesus?”

            Evan Willman said nothing for a spell.  Then, without taking his eyes off his book, he stated, with an exact sense of finality:

“Why, If It Isn’t

Father

Satan”

Refreshments for an Inquisition

            Ceremoniously, Father Satan lifted a stone chalice from off the dais before him and quaffed a fiery black drink, the steam flowing into his nostrils as he glowered down at the accused apostate.

And She, She Shall Be Known As Beertrice

            “But I don’t blame her, it isn’t her fault,” said Father Satan.  It’s been leading up to this for years.  I was always Evan’s foil, just his foil.  She’s basically a good kid.”

            “I think she has something to do with it, Father Satan,” I said.  “I mean, she was seeing both of you guys at the same time, and it wasn’t like you were the one who was going to be footing the bill for sandwiches at Café Noir or for pitchers of beer at The Far Mirage bar.  That’s why The Baby Jesus brought it all up in the first place, on that memorable date of critical implications for the metaphysical foundations of the universe as we know it.”

            Father Satan laughed. “I still don’t think you can blame her,” he said. “She’s a sweet young kid.  She can still be one of my acolytes.”

            “Then, as one of your acolytes, we must bestow a name upon her worthy of the honor,” I said.  “How about ... I know.  The incident of which we speak occurred at The Far Mirage, right?  And she has been known to help empty a pitcher or two, right?  So I propose we deem her ... Beertrice.”

            “Beertrice?”

            “Sure, like Dante’s Beatrice: only, instead of she who leads the infatuated toward heaven and into hell, Beertrice inspires us to attend The Gathering at The Far Mirage every Sunday night.”

            Father Satan mulled it over.

            Expounding on the notion, I continued: “Picture it: Beatrice takes you down to hell, you follow after her, until you come to the very center; only, for Beertrice, it isn’t Satan encased in a block of ice, but ... a beer keg.”

            Father Satan smiled, and said: “Beertrice, huh?  I don’t know.  Maybe.”

Beertrice With Dante

            We found Beertrice those days sitting at a table in Café Noir, with her paperback Italian-English dictionary and a hardback edition of Dante’s entire epic poem.  She assiduously worked on translating the poem for her literature class at the nearby theologically secular secularly theological Catholic University.

            At times, she took a break from her work to talk with us.  Her talk enchanted us, with its enrapturing ceaselessness.  Our gaze were held immersed in her, her staring at us as if watching each of the words she spoke materialize in the mirror of our eyes:

            “Oh my God, he’s so awesome it’s almost like you want to go to hell with him to see all these people who are down there and because you know you won’t be staying you know it’s pretty cool to be down there because you are going to see these evil people paying for their evil deeds right in front of your eyes and it’s just even more cool in the original Italian especially at the end when Dante runs into Judas and then finds Satan in a huge block of ice right in the center of hell not the fire you would have thought it’s all so so so Italian and poetic and all like oh my God wouldn’t you like to sit down and have a couple pitchers with Dante and Virgil and Beatrice Bice di Folco Portinari?”

Beertrice Entertains the Baby Jesus

            Many lines of conversation at Café Noir ended up at Evan Willman’s table.  It was as if his tattered leather backpack carried a portable salon, ready to yank out whenever Evan wanted to play host at a pop-up symposium.  A practiced listener and conversationalist, a talent cultivated during those days when he worked as an academic counselor at the nearby Catholic University, Evan had it all down to a nearly choreographic art.  The act started with a nod of the head—brief and smoothly accomplished; searching eye contact, then, a hard squint as he puffed on his prop and prompted you to continue talking by posing rhetorical questions phrased softly, such as:

            “And your boyfriend?  Where is he now?”

            “Oh he’s staying in Europe,” Beetrice said, her head bobbing along with her words. “See he’s visited there so many times that well before anything becomes serious between us he wants to stay there for a while and see how it feels like to be in the middle of a different culture without having to leave in three or four days.”

            The nod, the considered pause, the squint through the cigarette smoke, the response: “Oh, I see.”

Evidence for the Existence of The Baby Jesus

            Evan said: “And this is my photo album.  I only really show it to my closest friends.”

            Beertrice said: “Oh I see I see oh look at this one here oh look at you here you are such a hippie in this picture …”

            “MMM Hmmm”

            “… look you’re wearing granny glasses in this picture.”

            “That was when I was working as a coordinator for the McCarthy campaign.”

            “Oh cool.”

            “Waging our struggle against the war in Vietnam.  LBJ, WE AREN’T WAITING.  GET OUT NOW, SON OF SATAN!”

            “Really cool now what’s this who’s this here?”

            “Here, move a little closer so I can show you.  This picture was taken in grade school during our Christmas pageant.”

            “Oh my God look at you here you look like you are in one of those holy pictures that we used to have to wear around our necks in Catholic School.”

“You speak of scapulars.”

“Yeah them and you with the curly hair and the little round face you look just like him you are a perfect match you two if I didn’t know any better I could say you were him.”

            “Yes, I was known as The Baby Jesus ... though there were times when I was referred to as Goat Boy.”

            “Goat Boy why Goat Boy?”

            Evan shrugged.  “Well, I do get on people’s goat at times,” he said, with a laugh.

The Look of Beertrice

            Evan Willman set aside an hour at Café Noir one afternoon to admire a photograph on the tabletop that revealed a side of somber grace in the character of Beertrice.

For, that morning, she had given him a copy of the photograph after she accepted his offering of Dante’s epic poem in a classic hardback edition to replace her worn-thin paperback edition.  Afterward, their discussion drifted into memories of family death.  Evan’s father committed suicide, Beertrice’s father succumbed to emphysema then lung cancer.

The photo showed her dressed in a silk-white gown that flowed loosely around the fullness in her body as she posed behind the tombstone of her father’s grave.  Her eyes were cast in a mesmeric, faraway stare; her face carried a tranquilly grim expression.  Evan liked the way her hands rested softly on the tombstone, as if to steady it, as if to grant peace to the shell of the departed soul that had been shaken so long by gasped wheezes as it tried to gather oxygen.  She appeared to Evan like an Earth Angel become the Grieving Angel of the Mourning.

            Placing the photo face down next to his coffee cup and lighting up a cigarette, he found himself wondering how he would love her.  But he did not so much see her in bed with him, as him on her.  Her angelic body wrapped with sheets in the same silken white of the gown she wore on the tombstone photo, his head pillowed on the soft of her breasts, he saw himself curling on top of her and drifting off to sleep, as his breath played lightly on her ear.

But just as he had the vision, he felt unsettled by it.  He knew he must not allow himself to imagine sleeping on her: no, never, Evan had been studious in honoring the distant presence of her fiancé away in Europe.  Besides, he reminded himself, he was too old for her: he must not imagine a 42-year-old curling up on top of a bright young woman, still in her 20s.

Then he sighed out a plume of cigarette smoke.  What the hell, he thought: Beertrice was hot.

Beertrice, Smoking

            Evan said: “If your father died as a result of smoking too heavily, why, then, do you still smoke?”

            Beertrice stopped blinking to fix her open eyes on him. “Oh I guess same reason you do,” she said.

An Opening Statement From the Defense

            Poring over the voluminous tome of bound parchment before him and dipping his quill pen into a bottle of reddish-black ink, Father Satan jotted down notes into the Most Holy Book of Paperback before him and muttered sardonic words to himself in a snarl under his breath.  Then he announced: “You are before this court on charges of grave apostasy. Firstly, you dare to call yourself The Baby Jesus, and, secondly, you mock the Most Holy Books of Paperback.  Have you a response to these grave charges?”

            “While pondering the metaphysical implications of my studies of the works of arcane philosophers and theologians in varied forms of Latin and Greek and Hebrew,” Evan Willman stated, “I indeed arrived conclusively at the revelation that I had been called to carry the name of The Baby Jesus and was met by hosannas and exultations from my fellow scholars and practitioners in the arts of obscure theological inquiry.  Though knowing that you and the court would be in opposition and not particularly caring, I then followed with what I considered the inevitable inspiration to denounce these shameful Books of Paperback.”

            “MOST Holy Books of Paperback, blasphemer” Father Satan said, through a snarl.

“As a matter of enlightened integrity, I could do nothing else.  Thus, I think of it as the epitomic apex of my cerebral discipline, the very apex of my intellectual accomplishments, to have cursed in the print of my hardback treatise this grievously creased and hellhound-eared abomination you set before us.  It would be an honor to be doomed by this court for my actions, though I be damned through eternity.”

            “Damning you eternally is the lesser of the punishments that you face,” Father Satan responded, and began to call out the particulars of the offenses with a tick of the pen on The Sheet of the Damned: “And what other manner of cerebral convulsions are these that you insidiously spread like a communicable virus through this hardback treatise of yours? what, that our Lord God shared Magic Mushrooms with His Acolytes as Communion and thus Created Mass Hallucinations of False Miracles?  And that the Lord Committed Acts of a Carnal, Man-Loving Nature during his holy mission on earth?  Am I to take seriously what I am reading here? Yet you persist to term such blasphemies as the grand apex of your studies?”

            “Blasphemies, no.  Truth, I say.”

            “Do not speak of the truth,” Father Satan shouted, throwing his quill to the floor in his snarling anger, “to the keeper of the Most Holy Books of Paperback!”

Scenes from the Inquisition, Part II

            And, indeed, voluminous paperbacks lined towering shelves on the walls of the courtroom of this particular.  While Father Satan was referencing a pure white paperback, as white as a spotlight in an interrogation room, set upon the dais before him, the other paperbacks—extending out behind and above Evan Willman into the infinite—were in red, or black, or yellow, or tan.  What could these great paperbacks contain?

            As Father Satan was bending down below the dais to pick up his quill pen, Evan took the chance to sidle over to a nearby shelf and draw out a yellow paperback.  He opened it to discover it filled with the names of persons in minute print—name after name in a variety of Asian languages, column upon column that appeared to cover hundreds of sheets.  Scrawled by hand next to each name in the reddish-black ink of Father Satan’s quill pen was either a checkmark or an ominous X.

            But then Father Satan caught him and started pointing and jabbing the quill pen at him.  Evan dropped the paperback, which did not make a sound when it hit the floor.

Father Satan was raging again: “You read names etched in the plots of blasphemous crime,” Father Satan said, “all bound in eternities of parchment in the dust of this library of guilt.  And this blasphemous treatise of a hardback of yours is long overdue for a paperback edition.”

A Discourse on the Nature of Beetrice

            Eventually, I vowed to talk with Beertrice myself.  Not just a few offhanded pleasantries either, but a more involved conversation with historical and poetical and spiritual allusions ... even going beyond her conversations with Father Satan and The Baby Jesus.

I did not believe that this woman of these momentous moments truly understood what she had done, in unleashing these Manichean elements that now revolved around the being of Beertrice:  on the one hand, a committed Socialist who had proudly read the entire works of Marx and Lenin in chronological order in hardback editions and who, thus, was perilously close to betraying his lifelong tenet of eliminating all forms of competition from the world (for how many times had Evan chided me for turning to the sports page in a newspaper at Café Noir? for paying any attention whatsoever to the “funny pages of the adult bourgeois tribal male”); and, on the other hand, his newfound competitor, this Father Satan, who wants to be a paperback writer.

I planned to see her one night at The Far Mirage: a dive bar located near the Catholic University that the students and even some faculty regularly visited for sessions of drunken slumming and where Evan Willman conducted what he called The Gathering of scholarly misfits, casual Socialists, and peripheral layabouts for spirited drinking sessions:

Now, I was nervous about all of this because I feared that Beertrice would find my talents for conversation wanting, compared to her sessions with those two neighborhood philosophes.  I had no talent for entering into marathon discourses like those between those living personifications of Hegelian dialectics: Evan Willman for the hardback thesis, Father Satan for the paperback antithesis.

So, before the meeting, I rehearsed in my head what I would say: first, without alcoholic stimulation, hoping to gather in my mind a technique, a line of approach, an internal script that would impress her as I put forth the implications of her being Beertrice.  Then, I spoke it all out into a mirror on the wall as I drank down a six pack of Red Goat Bock Beer to practice imitating the witty protocol of the sardonic give-and-takes at The Gathering:

            “Our friend, now known as Father Satan, wants to be a paperback writer,” I said to the mirror. “He loves to talk in long hurried monologues about writing: about stories with a beginning and a middle and an end with short clear sentences and paragraphs.  One scene leading precisely to another.  With real-time and real-life actual characters.

            He mocks adjectives or 10-dollar words or novels that go—as he phrases it—nowhere slow.  ‘Where’s the story?’ is his question; and his answer, his rallying cry is: ‘You have to have a story.’  His search for the perfect story is vigilant and undeterred, Beertrice.  As an example, he would study pieces I had composed and return them, in a matter of minutes, with his verdict: ‘Well, the writing is pretty good ... but you need a story.’

But, when I ask him to show me something from one of the paperback novels I thought he’d been writing, he will tell me he will when he finishes it.  He never reveals shipwrecks, or discovery of a long-lost treasures, or a sudden revelation of the criminal who committed the murder going from Point A to Point B.”

            I shrugged at the mirror.  “What do you think, Beertrice,” I said. “What’s the story?”

The Eyes of the Netherworld

Evan Willman feels something watching him as Father Satan fumes and sputters over his book of fates.  Like eyes from out of shielded viewing room in a penitentiary high above a cruciform table where the death sentence will be injected into a condemned prisoner who knows he has a final audience he will never see.  Warily, Evan peers around the courtroom.  No panel of other judges or a phantasmic jury.  Just overpowering brick walls with jail bars allowing wisps of red smoke to seep in and color and cloud the chamber. 

            “Do the walls have eyes?” Evan thinks.

TV Baby

            “Well, thank you, I appreciate the gift, but I never really watch television,” Father Satan said.  “I keep to a world of books.”

            Beertrice stood behind the used television she was offering to Father Satan.  She laid her hands serenely on it and blinked at him.

            “One time,” Father Satan said, “I saw a sign one of my friends had tacked onto his television—a sign you actually had to read and not watch, ha, ha—that said, ‘Death to Your Television.’  That sums up my feelings ... not that I don’t appreciate your gift, I mean, I’ll make sure and watch something, but not all the time.  Because, I keep with books.  I mean, take a book that has a story, a real story.”  He pointed at her.  “You can lose yourself in a book like that, with a real story and real characters.  You can’t lose yourself in television.”

            Beertrice smiled, mildly.  She moved the tips of her curved fingers lightly over the top of the console as if she were a medium channeling through a crystal globe.

            Finally, she said:  “Televisions have stories don’t they of course they do my father would watch them when he was in bed sick and he would say that he couldn’t go a whole day without his story you know soap operas he called them his stories like he was the story only I could never sit through them I never really got the habit it’s like smoking I guess to some people those stories really hook you you can’t quit watching them even though they never end the stories I mean they can go on and on for years and years even.”

            Expressionless, Father Satan stared at Beertrice.  Then, he said: “Hey baby, let’s go to bed.”

The Criminal Plot

            I continued: “No, Beertrice, none of those profound, academic, weighty tomes for Father Satan; no, they were inferior to a good crime story that holds the pulp of true fiction at its center: the crime, the trial, the sentence, that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end.”

The Crime Itself

            I see you, Beertrice, at The Far Mirage with the One known as The Baby Jesus and he who shall soon be known as Father Satan.  You are sitting at their elbows and musing over your stein of beer, wary of saying anything, waiting for something worse than a whirl of fists or mugs heaved at walls, or blabbered obscenities—all struggles this bar has certainly seen in its time.

            Now, you have known this pair as convivial, sometimes entertainingly odd, older acquaintances at Café Noir; but you never expected that, here, together, they would vie for your sole attention as acting agents in a metaphysical drama, that their apparently lighthearted game of contentious friendship—with their improvised lines of needling digs and playful, mock insults—masked the ferment of a bitter, world-shattering conflict.
            Yes, by a round of cyclical and fateful occurrences, the character of the struggle has evolved to this epochal moment.  A shift in appearances, of positions, force and counterforce, leading to this encounter this night on this battlefield of near-Apocalyptic destiny known as The Far Mirage.

            You have not so much come between them as set this ultimate struggle into inexorable motion.  See, Beertrice, how Father Satan invites himself over to your table and makes a point of nudging you in the shoulder when he sits beside you, while The Baby Jesus prepares to tap into the Theological Depths of Metaphysical Consciousness for his scourging reply; as he observes Father Satan helping himself to a glass of beer from your pitcher without asking permission, his countenance chills with a cocked eyebrow, a malicious smile tugging on the corner of his lips.

            “Why, look who’s come to bore us with his stories about the Great American Paperback Novel,” begins The Baby Jesus.  “Are you going to pay us now or pay us later for that beer?  Before or after you negotiate your advance?”

            “Oh, come on, Evan, give me a break,” says Father Satan.  “I thought you socialist intelligentsia were supposed to share with the working class.  But if you want, I’ll be glad to find you a hardback edition of the Sex Life of Karl Marx for a glass of beer.”

            Evan sighs, and turns to you, taking on that voice of a kindly and worldly confidante he has been using on you since you have known him.  “Our mutual friend believes in drinking beer on the Five-Year Plan,” he tells you. “In other words, he’ll compensate us around the time of the millennium.”

            From the appearance of Father Satan, you anticipate a reply with fire; watering at the mouth to let loose on The Baby Jesus, his lips smack until you can see drops of spittle  You now sense a long night at The Far Mirage.  You reach for the pitcher, but both of your drinking partners extend a right hand toward the vessel to vie for the honor of serving you.

            “Oh, excuse me, after you,” says Evan.  “Of course, you are better at doing this than I am.”

            “What you mean by that, buddy?” says Father Satan.
            “I’m simply acknowledging your years of experience as a waiter, and a damn good one, I’d imagine.  One can’t help but notice the ... practiced manner you reach for the pitcher, so quickly and effortlessly, knowing someone else will be paying for it, soon enough.”

            Father Satan sits back.  “Big words from someone who couldn’t find another job after you were fired for telling the student newspaper you want to be the Messiah in that interview when they asked what you saw in your future,” he says.

“I must admit,” says The Baby Jesus, “that was a telling retort.  Worthy of a paperback writer.”

“So do something useful and you do the pouring then. Just don’t spill any on your lap.  You never know what you’ll find down there, when you wipe it off.”

            Baby Jesus suddenly takes on a solemn mien.  He drinks from his stein, and he looks at a beer sign display on the opposite wall for Red Goat Bock Beer with a cartoon of a scarlet billy goat head whose mouth munches on a six pack of empty cans on a mirrored background.

“Very good,” he whispers, as if to himself. “That was also well put.”

            Father Satan now moves in for a finishing volley.  “You might not find what you’re looking for, buddy.”

            “MMMM Hmmm”

            “So don’t wipe too hard.”

            “Excellent.  Perhaps you really are a paperback writer, then.  Even if we have yet to see one spurting out of your typewriter.”

            “You are so cute, Evan.  Like a bug.”

            How do you react, Beertrice?  Fill in the pause, or fill your empty glass as Evan Willman continues staring at the goat chewing the six pack?

Then Father Satan jabs a pointing finger at him.  “You’re a loser, my friend,” he informs Evan.  “A socialist with hardback books and a paperback spine —a loser.  I’ll bet you’ve never read every word of Marx; I’ll bet you wouldn’t recognize Karl if he walked into this bar naked wearing a red flag diaper.  I mean ... oh, how can you talk to a person? give me a break, you’re just full of crap, Baby Jesus, you’re all crapped out, you’re a loser.”

            But you had so much to say before, Beertrice.  Always so eager to talk.  Ceaselessly.  Never boring.

            “This is language I would expect from someone who reads cheap paperback books all day,” Evan retorts.  “Or are these phrases listed in the notecards you bring to Café Noir every day? to show us you really are writing a Great American Paperback Novel?  Please tell us.  We want to hear about your work, considering that we’ll probably never read any of it.”

            “Go to hell, Baby Jesus,” Father Satan spits out.  Then, as if exhausted by his expectoration, he looks to you and says, “You see this guy?  Calling himself Baby Jesus all the time?  You know what he really is?  The Baby Judas.  Throwing gold coins around to impress you.  The Baby Judas.”

            “Well,” says Evan Willman, “I do go by many names.”

            What do they see in you, Beertrice?

            Our Lady of the Apocalypse?  Helen of Troy as an International Supermodel who inspires Gog and Magog to the war table of a battlefield that the globe will see televised around the clock?  Are battalions of the spirit world mustered on an antediluvian landscape for your approval?  Now, what order of speech have you prepared?  Should you not lift your face to those forces arrayed before you, prepared to violently unite the duality of satanic and godly—too long locked in inconclusive, epochal stalemate—in a final struggle?  Should you not give your blessing with an upraised hand gesture as if from some sinister Pope, with words off your lips like the soul kiss of a Babylonian priestess?

            Instead, I hear you tell them: “Oh my God guys listen why are you fighting like this about paperback or hardbacks let’s drink another pitcher what do you say I’ll buy this time I promise I’ll buy okay okay I can read paperbacks and hardbacks oh my God what’s the difference okay let’s drink and be friends.”

And Now, We Return to the Inquisition

            The antagonists debate with precision.  The arguments are tangles of forgotten languages, arcane allusions, labyrinthine pursuits that date back to the first scribbles of sacred and pagan laws, on rocks and other hard places.  The visceral excitement of personal belief.  The recalled minutia from obscure scrolls.  Nuance in translation, a twist in dialect, a parameter of interpretation.  Voices rise as high as the tower of books that dominate the courtroom.  Abuse of protocol  A gavel sounds.  Objections sustained, then overruled.  An oath is broken, and bickering ensues over the difference between the apocryphal and the ordained.  Whole books are spoken in tongues.  Evidence is entered.  A hieroglyphic word undergoes tortuous scrutiny for what might once have counted for hours upon hours.  Evidence is withdrawn.  The proceedings degenerate into insults and whining.  Decorum is restored, a ruling goes unanswered.  Point of order, point well taken, point counterpoint, pointed rebuttal, prove the point, what is the point?  Where is the point?

            From Point A to Point B to Point C?

The Testament of Father Satan and The Baby Judas

            “Now, where was I, Beertrice?  Ah yes, what’s the story?  I mulled over his opinion about me, and about his own storyless existence.  What, indeed, was his story? his character? his plot?  I mean, he seemed so devilishly sure of himself, so correct, as only a Father Satan can be.  Then, one night, in here, at The Far Mirage ... I decided that a story wasn’t enough for Father Satan. Instead, the conflict of the Satanic One and The Baby Judas demanded more than a story: more like a testament.  I mean, they’re more than real characters, their metaphysical duel is the stuff of legendary personages, don’t you think?  And this testament wouldn’t have happened without you.  For you, Beertrice, are the amusing muse.”

The Structure of the Final Sentence

Father Satan intoned:

THEN THEY RAKED HIM WITH MORE

THAN A HUNDRED BOOKS

BELLOWING: “HERE YOU DANCE BELOW THE

COVERS.

GRAFT ALL YOU CAN THERE: NO ONE

CHECKS YOUR BOOKS.”

The shelfs of paperbacks began to smoke in what The Baby Judas saw as a furious spontaneous combustion.  And as the stench of flesh and hair on fire filled his nostrils in this oven of a courtroom where he had been bound to his fate, as a film of oily sweat and blood and blisters covered his forehead and flakes and ashes from torched paperbacks blinded him, as he cried from the smoke with the realization of what his new name would cost him and shouted and raved at The Inquisitor in spasms, The Baby Judas found himself curling into a quivering bubble on the floor.

A Real Page Turner

Courtroom cameras reflect it all for you.  Live, the story you have been following daily.  What you call your story.  Beginning, middle and … where will it end?  But it appears that an impeccably manicured woman’s hand is now turning the page on a book of this courtroom drama.  Like that model who turned letters into words on the game show for years.  Turning to an empty page.  Is this story, then, going blank?  Her hand turns to another page.  Still empty.  This can’t be the ending, just when it was getting good.  Or is the ending empty?  Because the hand just keeps turning to one empty page after another.  Again.  And again.  A story should end.  But you don’t want it to end.  Ever.  It is too good.  You are happy you put it on.  Your story.  This program: “The Wide, Wide World of Books.”

The Final Verdict

 “Now spill the silver spun from that great organ in your head to the ground” said Father Satan, “and give your nether cheeks the slimy kiss as you sizzle and shrivel before me for you have betrayed yourself with your very own words that I, your Father Satan, have finally made:

NOW

AVAILABLE ONLY

IN

PAPERBACK !!!!!!!!!!”

End Times With Beertrice

“Not exactly in chronological order at The Far Mirage tonight.  We have not been shifting seamlessly from Point A to Point B to Point C here.  More like watching television, when you are switching from channel to channel: watching a crime story but, before the criminal is caught, you push a button, and go into a horror story, but you never reach the stake driven into the heart of the beast, because you push the button and you are into a soap opera and … well, some of those can go on and on for decades and never truly end: one storyline leading to another that may appear to have ended, until the threads of the storyline are rewoven into the show: the main character hasn’t really died or even been born yet or the storyline we have been following for an entire year seems to have been going from Point A to Point B to Point C, but instead ends up to have all been a dream in the mind of a character, and so we start another season.

            I brought it to you that way, Beertrice, as a gift.  You are the amusing muse, you can decide.  Maybe The Baby Judas should be presiding over the Trial of the Millenniums, judging Father Satan in a room filled with shelf after shelf of omniscient hardback books?  Or, maybe you want me to do it?  Put them both down there in a gladiator pit, forcing them into a battle to the death over the supremacy of book formats.  Or would you like to play negotiator at a boardroom table, letting them argue point and counterpoint until you arrive at the compromise: the trade paperback?

            So, here is your gift, Beertrice.  I think it better than roses or chocolates or champagne for a woman I have never met face to face, only observed or overheard from afar at Café Noir and in The Far Mirage as you sweep through our lives, inspiring everyone you meet who drinks too much coffee or pitchers of beer.  I hereby present you, my lady, with the gift of bringing a story to end—the only way I could have ever won you over.

            And then, when you are finished reading it, maybe I … we could call this a romance novel?” I said to the beer sign display on the opposite wall for Red Goat Bock Beer with a cartoon of a scarlet billy goat head whose mouth munches on a six pack of empty cans on a mirrored background.

THE END

For Emily Kaiho and Hiro Todo