The Dark Balloon

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The fountain.

The business school building was a generous donation from the Gentrifik family. Built of marble and columns, it stood above a rectangular fountain with a statue of the Gentrifiks in the center. The fountain’s job was to spray water, much as the Gentrifiks’ job was to spray money. Water gushed from the floor, from the Gentrifiks’ eyes, from the sides, and from the air, carried by the wind as a mist. Kids played at the edges, water lapping their feet. Adults sat at the bench surrounding the fountain, admiring the fountain by reading or being absorbed in their own problems. Students exit the fat white rectangle and run down the steps. Students take off their shoes and socks and backpack and run into the fountain. Students would climb the statue in the center, slippery footholds and all. Students would take the climb all the way to the top, miles and miles above the water, above the children and adults and reading and absorbing. Students would perch on the top, fumble their pockets, and pull an orange thing of blood thinner pills. Students would ingest them all in a gulp and leap and plummet for what seemed like forever but was really ten minutes, because that’s what it took to fall all the way down, because that’s what it took for all the blood thinners to squirm their way into the students’ veins and arteries and all the other fantastical backalleys, and students would be unthinking, per usual, and students would land with a great noise—a splash and a smear—and students would lie their in the water not moving, not feeling, not doing anything really, and students would have their blood seep out quickly like hot red milk plunged into ice water and students would have their blood circulate through the fountain and students would have their five point seven three liters of blood misted over to the adults and children and reading and absorbing who would all suddenly feel the delightful same.

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George Tiller’s Death Comes as a Shocking Blow to Advocacy Groups’ Ability to Take Advantage of George Tiller’s Death.

Advocacy groups and advocates everywhere are mourning the loss of Kansas pro-choice doctor Dr. George Tiller following a fatal shooting during religious services yesterday.

“George Tiller was a great man,” says pro-choice Director Jeff Maloney of the Spangled American Liberties Committee of Truth and Beauty. “He was everything you wanted in a symbolic figure truly abstracted from whatever it was that he did.”

Pro-life Director Jeff Maloney of the Beautiful Spangly American Coalition for Liberties and Truth offered similar condolences. “You could really eviscerate Dr. Tiller. For years we were lost in the wilderness without a guiding light. Who do we attack? Where’s the face of pro-life antagonism?”

Director Maloney paused in a moment of staged drama and pretended emotion.

“George Tiller was that man.”

Director Maloney of the Liberties Committee extended his commiseration to Tiller’s family. “We hope they make it through this time of hardship and become an equally great symbol for our pro-choice advocacy with the same great ability to be transformed into something empty of their actual actions and humanity.”

Upon this remark, pro-life advocates reacted with outrage. In one pointed criticism, individual Jeff Maloney unintelligibly shouted, “I can’t believe these murderous communistic fetus haters would paint George Tiller in such broad strokes.”

“Clearly, he’s a pro-life symbol,” a statement to which pro-choice individual Jeff Maloney hysterically screamed, “Nuh-uh.”

Ultimately, of course, at the center of this awful situation is the death of a courageous man whose shooting can only be seen as a warning sign for the increasingly heated abortion debate.

“It’s true. George Tiller’s death will be his last great symbolic contribution to the visceral bile from both sides,” says Jeff Maloney.

“It’s tragic, really,” says Director Maloney, “that George Tiller can only die once.”

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WireTap: Mitch Hedberg.

An excerpt from Jonathan Goldstein’s WireTap CBC Radio program. The episode is “Who Wants to Live Forever”. (Zouzou is Goldstein’s daughter.)

Update URL fixed, sorry about that.

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Life after death.

An excerpt from This American Life’s “Life After Death” episode:

Darin Strauss does indeed have a new book out, More Than It Hurts You.

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Joshua.

Joshua watched as Moses collapsed on the stage. The desert’s blinding heat grew angry around him. It is well-known that climate will change to mark historical events. And, like Moses, it came and went.

Joshua stared at Moses. Joshua stared at the nothingness. He stared at it as he walked back to his tent. He stared at it when the desert turned cold, then very cold, then deathly cold. He stared at it when he closed his eyes.

He knelt down to pray. The Ten Commandments, he thought. Words from God himself, and not just any God. A decimalized, metric, proper God. To give structure to life, to give hope and beauty and meaning and—Joshua couldn’t stop shaking. The pictures of Moses, splayed dead before a crowd that, now, barely could remember him bubbled above the murk in his head, only to be viciously stuffed down by everything else. His hand twitched.

“Joshua?” A divine voice boomed into Joshua’s head. His hand began to really twitch.

Moses had warned Joshua about this. When Moses first heard the voice of God, he had to wash not only his britches but his socks, his shirts, and even his hat. It had been shocking—explosively shocking. Still, God’s voice came as a surprise to Joshua, whose most religious experience had been watching the execution of a man and then vomiting in a nearby toilet. In the face staring back at him on the porcelain bowl, he gave up, passed out, and saw a shining light.

Joshua stammered.

“Joshua, this is your Lord.”

“Yes, my Lord. What …” Joshua paused. He doubted the English language had the proper words, so he took a random stab. “What can I do for you?” He cringed; the English language cringed; several nearby animals felt the necessity to cringe. One of the continually-starved and therefore incredibly cynical desert lions blushed.

“Joshua, in a few days time, those awful people outside will choose you as your leader.”

“Why me, O Lord?”

“Moses chose you. You’re in his will, you know,” God said. If God had a Face, Joshua imagined that He would be smirking triumphantly in some sense of Cosmic Irony that He knew Joshua could not fully appreciate.

Joshua had reached for the shining light in his moment of depression, but a larger, more suffuse green light had overcome the white light. The light of doubt. He had snapped out of his slumber on the toilet seat, flushed it, and staggered outside. The mob, returning from the execution of the innocent man—the innocent men? Did it matter?—, rushed past him, drunk and happy and ignorant and cruel and happy.

Damn that old man, Joshua secretly thought. I just wanted to say hello. Then he goes and nominates me for some idio—

“I can hear your thoughts, you know.” Joshua stopped, feeling an unsettling combination between embarrassment, shame, and the fear that he might spend eternity in Hell with his soul constantly flambéed by spirits of infinite evil.

“If you have any doubts, Joshua, of the ineffability of it all, please—”

Joshua interrupted, “No. I am a servant of the Lord.”

“Aren’t we all?” God boomed, impassively.

Joshua waited.

“Ha ha,” God laughed, impassively.

Joshua sat, silent.

“It’s funny because I Am Completely Omnipotent.”

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Lateral puzzles #2: The complicated drink.

A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The bartender pulls out a gun and points it at him. The man says, “Thank you,” and walks out.

In this answer, everybody dies.

Charles rushed into the nearest bar. He looked at the bartender, straight in the eyes, and rattled off a long list of words that constituted a fancy drink served, traditionally, as part of a week-long celebration of sexuality in some Eastern European duchies. He hurriedly drank it and tried to leave.

“Not so fast, Charles,” said the bartender who, while saying this, pulled out a gun, which was dozing peacefully between the bourbon and the vodka.

“That’s a cat, Simone. But thanks anyway.” He walked out.

The bartender cursed, but it was too late. Charles had made his escape. The bartender threw the cat (Dr. Whiskers) away and leapt well over the counter, hitting the floor running.

They ran through the city night, passing by an old woman who unbeknownst to her was about to die of old age peacefully, 20 years from now. The old woman fed the pigeons because her children never called. She glanced at Charles and Simone as they ran by.

They ran through the city night, passing by the statue of Wilhelm, the city founder. Wilhelm, who had imbibed an immortality portion to prevent death only to have his political enemies bronze him to a supposed death, heard the pit-pat-puts of the footsteps on the cobbles. He sighed and re-derived the Grand Unified Theory for the 1.48e18th time.

“How’s it going, Wilhelm?” said the old woman, tottering past the man with the golden body.

“Fine. You, Agnes?” said Wilhelm.

“My back’s acting up real bad.” The old woman grunted and shuffled away.

Wilhelm loved Agnes. She was funny, and he knew she was beautiful because her voice was beautiful and even if she wasn’t he would still never stop looking at her, and if this wasn’t love what was? Wilhelm tried to send all his love to her. His love, honed by not having felt anything else inside the statue for all these years, was so strong it caused Agnes back to chronically ache. Agnes, feeling the pain every time she walked near the statue, eventually stopped frequenting Wilhelm at all in a twist of cruel, Pavlovian fate. Their love—for it was mutual—drove them apart.

Say “I love you,” goddamnit, Wilhelm thought to himself. But the embarrassment would be too much, even for a man trapped behind bronze. And so his love, like him, sat pure, cold, and untouched.

They ran through the city night, entering into a dead-end. Simone cornered Charles into an alley. “Why did you run?” she screamed at him, somewhat incoherently. “You know I need the money. I trusted you. I trusted you!”

Simone waggled the gun at him.

“Careful. Careful. You’ve never shot anybody before.” Charles tried to project a soothing tone of absolute care.

“I shot a man once, just to see what the police would do,” Simone said.

“What did they do?”

“Bleed, mostly.” But that’s not what her heart said. Her heart said this: “I love you.”

“I’M NOT HAPPY,” Charles screamed, incoherently. His heart said the same. And his hypothalamus agreed and added, “Why must I always be defined by whom I am below?”

Charles, a deer in the headlights, stared at Simone—a beautiful shaking woman with auburn hair and a gun in her hand pointed at him, shaking because she wished she had a bronze mask, shaking because it was cold inside and outside her, shaking because she knew why he was unhappy—, Charles being a man who only had the thoughts of Eastern European Carnivale running through his head, but a man, a man who had lived alone ever since his family died in the fire and he had found misshaped love in auburn elsewhere, a broken man with big brown eyes.

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Lateral puzzles #1: The soggy corpses.

In the middle of the ocean is a yacht. Several corpses are floating in the water nearby.

Solution. People were on the yacht. Mike, who owned the yacht, had bought it not to seem ruggedly sexy as other buyers might but simply because the yacht reminded him of his trips into the sea with his grandfather. Yes, his grandfather and he had bonded over slow fishing trips where the eye casted over the horizon as the sun swooped and dipped and, finally, sunk beneath the waves leaving only the cool twilight and the ocean’s mist and the seagulls overhead and the beach and the mind alone with its thoughts. In his later years, Mike tried to find the same sense of warmth and belonging among his wealthy golf club friends but what he found instead was that money would never replace his childhood memories. As Mike angrily punched a hole into the boat, his friends stood back in shock.

Richard, who was an accountant, tried to stop him. Richard in college had majored in Finance and therefore had spent his first few years as an adult by continuously ensuring that he would make wads of cash. Richard, who worked out in a gym because he liked to impress women besides his wife, who loved him because she feared the alternative, pulled Mike back with his fancy, rich muscles. Hew sipped his long foreign cigar ironically, holding onto his ironic wife in their ironic marriage, which now predicated upon their sleeping, ironically, in two ironic separate bedrooms and never talking to each other except ironically politely over the ironic breakfast table so that their children would, ironically, never see their ironic anger.

“Looks like Mike has a chip on his shoulder,” Hew said, pointing out the chip of wood on Mike’s shoulder.

But, by then, water had already begun to fill the boat. Should the boat have been better designed so that punches could not penetrate its hull? It was too late to ask, and much too late to answer. “To the life rafts,” Richard cried. But they could not find it for someone had already let them slip. The water filled the boat, and they drowned—first Richard, then Hew, then Mike, who slipped away thinking of his grandfather, who in his last years of senility had asked Mike if he was happy. Mike didn’t respond then and now he drowned without knowing.

Mike’s grandfather, yards away, rowed the lifeboat with an agility surprising for his age. “Those Commie bastards can’t even tell when an American has sabotaged their own damn boat,” he cackled. He rowed harder, borne ceaselessly against the Red infiltration.

If you have more lateral puzzles, please send them via comments.

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Palpitations.

The little boy sat over the anthill with a magnifying glass, waiting for the inevitable fire. His nose dribbled a little, and he wiped it with the wrist not holding the bringer-weapon of fire. Nothing was catching fire, and his lazy summer was glacially drifting toward boredom, the worst island in the emotion archipelago. He peered through the magnifier. He saw one ant holding a tiny gun, point it at him. The ant took off the safety and shot. The tiny bullet, born from a tiny puff of smoke, shot toward the little boy as it grew larger and larger before piercing the magnifying glass at its regular size. That’s just how magnifying glasses work. The little boy sat or splayed on the sidewalk with the glass shards in him, on him, and around him. They formed a halo around his blonde head. He was a crimson red and blond angel of death killed by Badass Jones, the most badass and gun-toting ant of them all. Badass Jones!

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