Lott

Sketch of a rough day

The Voice raised itself up, from out of the Tohu Bohu, to speak once again. In the sound, a distant booming was married to an artificial insect whine. It was an immense humming, throbbing. Lott knew it, and it knew Lott. He prostrated himself before the sound, because it was the Voice of the Lord.  

“You are my messenger,” Yao said. “Tell the people of Sadogonorrhea that it will end for them in absolute ruin.” 

“They will understand that?” Lott asked. It didn’t seem likely. They listened only to the whispers of salaciousness. In addition, ‘it will end’ was poorly defined even by Yao’s standards. “They won’t get the point.”

“That is not your concern.”

Though scolded thus, Lott still spoke up in objection. “You would annihilate all for the sins of many?”

“For the sins of all,” said Yao, irritably correcting him.

“If I found one living there who was not depraved, you would bridle your wrath?”

“LOL,” said Yao.

“Would you, though?” Lott persisted.

“Sure, why not,” said the Lord.

So Lott went among the people of Sadogonorrhea, and spoke to them of the Lord’s words. These they scorned, as Lott had expected. Lott was known in Sadogonorrhea, and was held in no high regard there.

“You have something to tell us, you crazy old fuck?” they asked.

“Listen not to me but to the words of the Lord,” Lott advised them. “I am nothing of consideration to you beside His messenger.”

Lott found scant interest in Yao, or – at first – in the coming Obliteration. Sadogonorrhea ran on licentiousness, fossil fuels, and corn syrup. It was twitchy and disinclined to concentrate. Sonic bubbles atomized it.

Occupying the dead center of Sadogonorrhea was the great temple of Paradise Mega-Burger. The crowds were always dense and joyful there. Lott arrived as the sun was setting. A golden calf on the roof caught its last rays. Lott had not seen it before.

“Who is that?” he asked.

“Yao,” the crowd laughed. “We call it the Great Idol.” 

Offerings to the gods of Unshackled Lust were piled up in rotting heaps before it.

“Attend to the words of the Lord,” Lott demanded, again. None did so.

“We prefer poker.” Everybody laughed.

“Yao commands you to turn from evil,” Lott said. “Cease your vile fornications. If you would live, you should bend yourselves to the Law.”

“Fuck that shit, we have Internet porn,” the crowd replied. There was much laughter among them. “We’re so on drugs,” they added.

“This orgy will end in ashes.”

“Fuck you, Lott,” the crowd jeered. It wasn’t a new thought for them. “Don’t let your own bullshit smack your ass on the way out.”

“Only one,” Lott begged. He raised his voice almost to a shout. “It would take only one.” No one was listening.

He cast his gaze about the great city. Was there truly nothing but impurity here?

“Only one,” he repeated.

“Your monotheism is no good here,” someone spat.

Lott winced at the misunderstanding. One is enough wouldn’t resolve it.

“Time is short. Bow down before Yao,” said Lott. “Turn not from your course and you will surely soon burn. This city shall be called Soddoom, as it is already known in Heaven.”  

“Fuck you, Lott. And I mean, seriously.” They pelted him with fast food debris and dirty needles. “Don’t think you’re better than us.”

“Yeah, fuck you Lott,” shouted another. “You ain’t the boss of me.”

“Yao judges you.”

“You think there’s anything he could zap us with that we’re not already paying for, or hungry to pay for?” asked the most philosophical among them. “Hey guys, Lott here says his man ‘Yao’ is going to be dishing out inexistence, for free.” Then he said to Lott, more soberly: “To sacrifice eternity for an instant of infinite bliss – is that not the perfection of sin?”

The crowd tittered libidinously. Prospective Obliteration did not demoralize the populace of Sadogonorrhea. They anticipated eyeball-melting ecstasy.

A man stood at the front of the crowd, smiling. Lott read the slogan on his filthy T-shirt, and winced. It said: Yao-blast, the ultimate trip. 

Hope died in Lott’s soul. “They’re goddamned accelerationists,” he muttered to himself, in despair.

Lott slunk away into the maze of the doomed city. Children whispered in the alleyways. “Would you, could you, in the dark?” Doctor Zeus had taught them to say it.

A young girl had followed him. “You’re not wrong,” she whispered. “Our bodies are incapable of it.”

“Incapable of what?” he asked.

“Incapable of reaching the end,” she clarified. “They’re too weak. They need to burn,” she added, unnecessarily. 

“Your impatience is a blasphemy,” Lott replied, knowing it would do no good.

There was a stillness everyone felt, in the dilated moment before. The tension was a stretch of abstract, cosmic lust. It swept in from an alien dimension, like a negative wind – an inaudible sigh of waiting. 

“Give it to me big guy,” moaned an eyeless leper.

The occurrence was silent at first, because sound is slow. A bubble of annihilation swallowed the city. Its thoroughness was radical.

Lott felt the heat upon his back. “Sadogonorrhea is gone,” he said.

“Holy shit,” mumbled his elder daughter. “Yao doesn’t piss about.” Sadogonorrhea had affected her manner of speech.

“The event is entirely consistent with natural causality,” the younger daughter added.

Lott’s wife had to see, even if it would cost everything. Too much had happened to miss. At once she was converted to an impossible density of white desiccation. Wisps of saline inanimacy peeled away into the desert wind.

“We just have to trust that Yao knows what he’s doing, I guess,” Lott mumbled, mostly to himself.