Chapter 3: Abraxos
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MILWUAKEE, WISCONSIN 2016
I am that man with his ballcap pulled low in the stupid espionage action flick where everyone whisper-yells, the guy you only see for one tension building scene. On a Milwaukee bus in some endlessly repeating shit-winter to identify a person of interest. Grandma is intriguing to some ghoul above me in a cheap suit that talks like a fed but can’t be because we’re both dead. There’s my target. Little old lady waiting to chat someone-anyone up at the front of the bus.
Ethel Mason. She’s young end of grandma, had them babies at 19 and 22. I’m not trying to reduce her to “mom”, its just anybody who ever sat next to her on the bus or stood next to her in a grocery store line knows about them babies and grandbabies. She’s got a mess of pictures of her little grand-goblins on the “space phone” (standard smart phone) those same grandbabies taught her how to use (kinda). Before it was her grandchildren she showed off to strangers, it was physical photos of the fam in that thick plastic daisy chain they used to put in old wallets. She’d unfurl that motherfucker like a galleon’s sail and settle in for a good long “visit” with whomever fate put before her in a long line or an unexpected wait.
Ethel was more than somebody’s momma and grandmamma, obvious or should be, but that was the box she got put in: housewife. The woman exceeded said role, also obvious or should be. Damn fine piano player, as the folks at her daddy’s bible thumping church can attest. Married a man who was very thirsty and already-broken in a way that felt family familiar. Frank the drunk got worse, and the weight fate put on Ethel the decent woman got both heavier and lighter as her about-to-be-ex-husband put his old Forge pickup into a retaining wall and that beautiful but oil-burning in-line engine into the cab (and the driver).
That was what, winter ’93? Ethel did the deed: continued to raise two kids alone, but actually alone now. She didn’t grind her way to some corporate office or lean into her labors and get some kinda college, for such a path never showed itself. Her kids though, first generation in either side of her family to get degrees. She poured coffee. She cleaned houses. She clerked. Gave piano lessons. She a lived a life on permanent cobbled-together-employment ‘swing shift’ fueled by caffeine, nicotine, and spite.
Ethel caught the heart attack that lives some time along that life’s bus line. And no, the first one didn’t kill her. Look at her. She’s toward the front of an MTCS bus moving, plodding south through Milwaukee. Ethel’s rocking the cue-tip pixie cut, curls close to her head. Big old scarf round her neck and that nana-puff coat, same one your momma had back in the 80’s and the 90’s and forever because winter fashion don’t cycle or change way up north.
I came here, because Lucifer came here / is here/ will come here, not to nab. We can’t do that. Events that happened in time and on worlds? They happened and they have to be let to happen. When something outside comes into time, it’s there. It was always there. It happened. The rock is in the river now (even if it comes back out). Makes less sense to me. I came to confirm the identity of the old lady for meta-surveillance. I keep coming back. Lucy keeps coming back. We keep coming back.
I adore Ethel. All there is to it, my motivations. And about my tenth time on this ride I realized that Lucy loves her too. Dozens of re-runs now, the little conversation ride, and I still don’t know how or why she called me to sit closer and to look at somebodies Halloween costume. I listen to myself on autopilot while she pinballs from her grandson’s academic struggles freshman year at college to her eldest daughter’s hair salon “out toward Waukesha” and its great success.
It is bittersweet every time she tells me of surgery and recovery, “They talk about learning resilience a lot on these podcasts my granddaughter sends me, and I’m baby you don’t learn it you demonstrate it.”
“You’re damn.” Language. “You’re darn right, Ethel.”
“Time to get my exercise.” When the bus hits her stop, and this gem of a woman makes a muscle with her little arm and goes to sling packages at the Wish Fulfillment Centers. I do what I do every time: unwrap the hard candy she gave me, slowly and solemnly. I eat the sacred thing, let it melt the whole long way. Never daring to bite and crunch the candy as I did in my mortal life (every time). I do fold and unfold and inspect the gold foil wrapper like a relic, last and only physical trace of a saint.
Ethel is the opposite my grandmother. My Nana was a hard holler woman who kept a .38 revolver in her bra before it was cool. I love Ethel my adopted ephemeral gram-gram because she is the opposite of my Nana. No disrespect to Nana lest her spirit find me and pistol whip me, I loved or fear-loved her but this is some damned decent and sincere saint before me. Ethel is decent and sincere and loves her family, works hard, saves. She refuses to quit on life.
Shame her overworked heart quit on her. Felt tired a few days. Threw up that morning, but crammed a few peanut butter crackers in her mouth and in that fanny pack. Ethel looked herself in the mirror, said “gut up” ice cold as she only ever was to herself and no one else. She shook the stab-tingly pains out of her arms and worked her sore jaw and got to the bus that would take her to that warehouse job south of town.
Mid-shift, Ethel’s on the long walk back from the bathroom about to get talked to for taking extra breaks from a line lead when she collapses. Company got a million cams to keep workers from thieving. Not one person on hand to handle worker coronary. Sack of potatoes. Knees down, body topples unceremoniously. And the long ten seconds or so before anyone notices and rushes to render aid.
They stacked boxes around her. Like a child’s pillow fort, except not at all. Managers got carts and great heavy things, biggest bulkiest boxes they could find. Management made a privacy fence of backyard barbecues still boxed and playpens. A pallet of cat litter or two. A home gym destined to be deposited at someone’s door. They lay arrayed around the body of Ethel Mason for hours long hours so the workers wouldn’t see a corpse while they kept slinging kitsch into totes–the dance that must never stop.
Not a laurel wreath or garland. Just kitsch in boxes piled on cold concrete around a woman who played piano and had a surprisingly lovely singing voice in spite of the cigarettes.
I get it. I get why Lucifer keeps coming back. He loves her. Whatever else, he is taking personal vengeance for Ethel on the man he deems responsible.
I don’t give a fuck about the significance of Ethel’s death and the outrage and righteous anger stoked at her death. I don’t care that the kids in her shop make her a labor martyr and get their union. I’m glad for them, the living and their wins (rare as they are). But I resent the fact that this woman dies because fate says so, because time’s arrow says so.
And when time’s arrow finishes its flight and everything that is or ever was goes cold and falls in to crunch-be-crunched, or so they tell me. When reality goes to bed to burst back again as the echo permanent, what happens to the time that predates all that hot gas and rock and all them particles lying still for a bit? Time will not ‘re-set’ but barrel forward in perfect repetition. And some portion of that wild energy from the next Newton’s-Cradle big bang will begin its 13.8 billion year long walk toward Milwaukee to become a woman named Ethel who will die a death she doesn’t deserve on the cold concrete of a warehouse floor.
I get it now, the ‘why’ of it. What Lucifer hates, and why burning down time and causality and creation aren’t calculated risks but his whole purpose. I want to help him.
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Jeffe Abraxos has more money than god. Rictus-grin stuck beneath sociopath eyes. He calls his riches “earnings” as if he has ever earned a damn thing. His brain is a spreadsheet, and there’s a hamster wheel driven by a tiny sprinting Hitler where a man’s heart should be. Abraxos lays like a dragon atop its horde: a business empire that owns and depends on all those Wish Fulfillments Centers manned by workers like Ethel Mason.
Hank Forge, Ergot Tusk, Andrew Carnage, Jeffe Abraxos. Pallet swaps of older-other unremarkable robber barons, and I would not waste effort speaking on the man if he didn’t meet such a remarkable end. For Forge and Carnage it was hospitals and universities and gilded age style philanthropy: leave institutions in your wake that might make up for some of the “you” you did in life (like having union organizers murdered).
In the twenty-first century, and reader I’m sad to say this fact persisted past the first-shitty-draft of creation and into the multiverse, most capital-R-rich and useless people now spend their ill-gotten-gains screaming “I want a pony!” and then buying up a company or 10 capable of design and manufacture of their desired pony.
There’s no common good in the modern rich man’s codpiece. At least Forge left hospitals and Carnage-Melons is a good school (I guess). They say they “create jobs”, like they did us a favor. But the jobs Abraxos created were: get worked to death in a warehouse, manage the people being worked to death in the warehouse, build me a big-boy dick rocket death trap with a proper shittin’ throne. Celebrate that, if you really want to. The shittin’ throne. That’s what does it for me, really makes me hate the man and helps me be completely ok with his death. Thing that brought me and mine over the Lucy’s side.
We’ve established that Jeffe Abraxos had more money than god, and that means he possessed exactly nothing without a firm dollar value. The intangibles. That in this world which cannot be bought. The good shit. Imagination, for example. The man child demanded a rocket, big and extra phallic. A rocket little Jeffe received, but from the Soviet-plagiarized motors at the base to the malformed luxury orbiter at the dick-tip, the thing lacked inspiration or imagination.
The piece de resistance of Jeffe Abraxos’ rocket project was the orbiter’s latrine, painstakingly over-engineered by NASA and Roscosmos cast-offs. Best view in the house, in the whole orbiter, is from the can. Maybe you’re saying “I do a lot of reading and great thinking in the can.” Reader. Friend. I respect that. In life, I did my best thinking just past the masturbation and weeping phase of my showers. To each their own.
Jeffe was no toilet intellectual. Man had the money pile required to fling himself into the firmament properly and safe-ish, and all he was ever excited to do was shit with a god’s-eye view of Earth-whole-Earth. Shit Jeffe Abraxis did into a vacuum toilet that, thanks to some subtle sabotage (Lucifer, Lucy did it), sucked his contents out his butt (with great force) into space and left a little frozen constellation of rich man innards to pling-ping off the satellites and debris Kessler-accumulating in low orbit.
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MORE TO COME