Chapter 1

“Dark, grotesque figures, in a soundless rage, attacking with the fury of a Florida man...

“Dark actors, leading Mickey Mouse to a prison shanking in the shower.

“Yessir, it was all angles and no curves. The blood hunter’s ghost marriage proposal, that anagram in The Lancet ... All this while the doctor radiated heat, felched by a broken mirror. The doctor’s stethoscope and sphygmomanometer taking shape in the steam.”

The city’s neon panorama was shrinking in the rearview. The river of animation scattered into faint, winking pinpricks of light.

Curving along an empty highway, the Cadillac clattered further into gathering tendrils of mist. The car’s engine grinding, like the gnashing of teeth.

Santa Claus was at the Caddy’s wheel, wheezing and sniffling. Then Santa squinted, hit the high beams. The air outside was becoming increasingly befogged with a chalky dust, the fog glowing in an almost iridescent whiteness...

“It’s wrong on more levels than a broken elevator. I tell you what ... The higher up Huang Yanling climbed, the more she showed her ass.

“She just had the worst case ever of the butterfingers. Up and fumbled that Frankenstein dish. Then she pressed her eyes shut, as if in prayer, and hung her round face low ... a setting moon ... Yessir, you can bet a kidney that a whole long list of exonerating lies went tumbling through her head.

“But little did she realize how many horrible things had already flown out: hatred, hunger, pain, poverty, disease and death. All of life’s miseries, let out into the world.

“Just one, just one ... one wrong move altered the course of human history. The CCTV footage of that fumble, oh brother! It’s up there in the panopticon, somewhere, for sure. Too bad we don’t have a Lizzy Salander to dig up that database ... Talk about pictures worth a trillion words.”

Santa’s nose trickled blood. His jowls hung low, boiling in layers of anger. He had hot, dark rings of pain beneath his blue eyes, and a tangly mess of white hair curled down to his neckline. A silky menace colored his tone as he spoke.

“The Supreme Leader, Brother Snake God, when he got the word, he had the sad face of a chained monkey. Gotta wonder how many messengers he snuffed out, before he sniffed the opportunity, before he fed the demons.

“Brother Snake God did in his dentures, soccer kicked over a row of tombstones, knocking them down like dominos, and then Brother Snake God commanded his comrades to open the zoo gates, concoct a cauldron of rumors ... Yessir, Brother Snake God only chooses people he can control.

“Yessir, Brother Snake God ordered an invasion of cleaners and scrambling dragons. The cleaners shining in the last light of day. The scrambling dragons speaking only in solecisms. Yessir, the scrambling dragons’ truest truths are rarer than diamonds. Their truest truths come fringed in sunbursts of gold.”

Santa’s flushed face creased into a smile. He flashbacked to street art, Banksy-esque graffiti paintings of little people held upside down, by their ankles, small holes bored into their brains. The little people’s skulls dripping egg-yellowy oils into petri-dishes...

“The little people can lap through the water. They can cast misty shadows. The little people run, scratch, and bite, but, in the end, they’re always tripping up like a startled duck,” Santa growled, staring daggers, and a snarl of revulsion broke across his lips. Then Santa stepped on the gas, throttled the engine, revving it like a chainsaw.

“But the world was swaddled, sickly, and it took that honey, wandered in circles. The world carving paperboard cutouts of people ... Then Tedros did the duckwalk ... The Snakes’ puppets operating with the precision of hornets building a nest.

“Yessir, then there was Charles M. Blow, and Chris Cuomo, Stephen Colbert, all their ilk: the Goat Fucks.

“The Goat Fucks were living through screens, pissing and throwing pennies from atop skyscrapers. The Goat Fucks on opposite sides of smiles, treating scientists’ diplomacy as if the scientists were sending lit sticks of dynamite...

“Goat Fucks pointing guns, leading the blind into caves, mocking the blind’s prostrations ... The Goat Fucks expatiating, with Brother Snake God and the Snake-charmers, in bone-white slants, moonlighting and pantomiming emotions.”

Santa paused, momentarily, and as he emptied his heaving chest, his voice strained, “But the blind kept crawling. On their bare bellies. They swarmed, chins wet, under milk-white stalactites sharper than vampire fangs. With a mouthful of batshit, the blind went hiding in corners, shivering as they hugged their knees. The blind ignorant, unaware of words glistening with moisture. The blind’s cries simple as guide dogs. The blind’s footsteps followed by speeding trucks.”