The Sixth Circle
The boatman had a thin face, a dewlap and a pencil-thin moustache, and he paddled his boat with a Greenland stick. When he saw Vergil and the Founder standing on the bank, he whirled the paddle and made a wake that oscillated off both banks of the river. But when he saw that it was Vergil and a tourist, his smile disappeared.
‘Why do I get the garbage rides’, he said. ‘It’s like waiting for fares at Laguardia.’
‘Stuff it, Phlegyas’, Vergil said. ‘We’re on a mission from God.’
The boatman looked at the Founder and said, ‘You got any gold teeth? I got a family, I mean.’
‘Knock it off’, Vergil said. ‘The guy’s a civilian.’
‘Charon gets all the good fares, the boatman grumbled. ‘He must be screwing someone rich.’
The river was the color of the river that forms the border between Texas and Oklahoma. The founder was not sure whether the reddish tint was from clay or plankton. At the halfway point, a hand rose from the water. A rangy-looking guy grabbed the prow of the boat and raised himself onto the gunwale. ‘Impeach Biden’, he said. ‘Lock him up.’ Phlegyas grabbed one blade of his paddle with two hands and whacked the guy across the head as if with a baseball bat. The guy lost his grip and sank into the water without blowing any bubbles.
‘I know that guy’, the Founder said. ‘He used to date Dee Dee, the manager at my park in central New York.
‘He seems to have an anger management problem’, Vergil said.
‘I don’t know what she saw in him.’
‘How’s she doing?’
‘Good, thanks. I am lucky to have her. I just wish she had better taste in men.’
‘Maybe the pickings are slim.’
‘That’s what a lot of women say.’
.
At the other side of the river, a large city that had been a smallish town on a hot plain thirty years prior rose like a cancerous growth. ‘Sorry about the construction’, Vergil said. ‘It’s like low-rent Dubai, or pre-post-apocalyptic. People don’t even try to keep Dis weird anymore.’
The Founder ducked as the boom of a crane swung by his head. ‘What the fuck’, he said. ‘Do GPSs even, like work here?’
‘Not if they were built any earlier than yesterday’, Vergil said. ‘It is all the people who want to live in Dis who have made it go to shit. There’s even a song about it.’
‘Can you even, like get a Dis area code anymore?’
‘Nope.’
‘What’s the attraction?’
‘The music scene, of course. The university. All the tech bros. It’s the gateway to the lower levels. And the lower levels are the main event.’
‘So this has just been warmup? You been fuckin with me?’
‘It’s hell, dude.’
.
In the driverless cab to the edge of the plain, Vergil said, ‘We are going to skip a few sub-circles.’
‘Like, what?’
‘The Wrathful, the Fallen Angels, the Heretics, the Violent Against Neighbors, the Violent Against Themselves, the Violent Against God, the Violent Against Nature, the Violent Against Art, the Fraudulent and Malicious, the Panderers and Seducers, the Flatterers.’
‘Sounds like my rent roll.’
‘That’s why we are going to skip it.’
‘Who drives this thing?’
‘Ask an engineer. I am only a poet.’
.
‘I knew a guy named Simon’, the Founder said. ‘But he was a Brit.’
‘I think they should re-brand this section. Call it Corruption for fuck’s sake. That’s what everyone calls it. Except the Chinese. They call it fubai.’
‘You get a lot of them here?’
‘Oh, fuck yeah. They drive up real estate prices.’
‘So – why do they still call it Simony?’
‘You don’t eighty-six a word like that.’
‘But – nomenclature aside, have they re-engineered the process?’
‘This area used to be full of upside-down baptismal fonts.’
‘What’s a baptismal font?’
Vergil stopped, faced the Founder full-on and looked in his eyes and sneered. After a beat he said, ‘Young people’. Then he continued, ‘They have re-stocked the area with structures that are deemed a better fit for the task at hand. Each one is tailor-made for the applicable sinner.’
The Founder remembered a story he had read in which criminals were punished by having the name of their crime inscribed in their flesh until they bled to death. ‘An insurance company lawyer wrote stories about that kind of punishment’, he said. ‘He lived in central Europe in the first half of the Twentieth Century.’
‘He’s here’, Vergil said. ‘He works in upper management. He’s a rising star. I understand he negotiated a great pay package when he came on board.’
‘Good for him’, the Founder said.
‘He pissed off a few people when he did that’, Vergil said.
‘The corporate world is hell’, the Founder said.
‘Yes, it is’, Vergil said.
.
On a plain of flat-topped hills cut by vein-like streams, Vergil and the Founder came upon a water riser pit set in the middle of a mobile home pad. Instead of pipes and insulation, six feet, belonging to three people suspended upside down, protruded from the riser. One of the pairs of feet wore sensible high heels. Another wore steel-toed work boots. The third wore Walmart-brand sneakers.
‘What’s the story here’, the Founder asked.
‘They hang them upside down for a while and apply cattle prods. After a while, they drop down into cracks in the earth underneath where they are and their place is taken by other corrupt officials.’
‘Where to the crevasses lead to?’
‘Honestly, I don’t know.’
‘And there are always people to take their place?’
‘An infinite regression.’
‘No vacancies, ever?’
‘Nope.’
‘Watch this.’
The Founder removed one of the high-heeled shoes from the foot where it sat, and he tickled the flesh that covered the tendon that connected the ball of the foot to the heel. The foot wriggled and from inside the riser pit he heard a woman’s voice giggle and say, ‘Hee, hee – sto-op.’
‘Would you do that with the men’, Vergil asked.
‘Fuck no’, the Founder said. ‘Did you see Pulp Fiction?’ He replaced the woman’s shoe. ‘I think I know these people’, he said.
‘Oh, really?’
‘Not personally, but I know of them. The woman is the head of HCR. The guy in boots is the code enforcer in charge of manufactured housing for the state of New York. The guy in the cheap sneakers used to own parks, but now he runs a consulting business. He runs educational seminars on behalf of the state.’
‘Are they Simoniacs?’
‘I do not believe that they are corrupt.’
‘Should I raise the issue with Management? We have had people sent down here unjustly.’
‘Hold off on that. Even if they are not corrupt, HCR belongs somewhere around here. Although they are an executive branch office, they implemented and enforced the 2019 Nakba law more enthusiastically than justified.’
‘A lot of people around here bought houses with the bonuses that the Nakba law brought’, Vergil said. ‘Some people built additions to their homes with the money. They say, ‘Let’s eat in the Nakba garage’, or ‘Should we drink our coffee in the Nakba nook this morning?’’
‘HCR thinks that lot rents should be limited to forty percent of fair market value apartment rent – and God knows how they would set that’, the Founder said. ‘They draft chickenshit lease riders, release them at the last minute, and expect park owners to have them included in their leases in a day by, I don’t know – waving a magic wand? They refer eviction cases to the AG’s office. They require park owners to spend money to upgrade infrastructure, but they limit the ability to collect revenue. They tried to ram a new type of mortgage product that was the love child of Rube Goldberg and Trotsky down our throats.’
‘What about the code enforcer’, Vergil asked.
‘He says that manufactured home pads have to be six inches thick with a twelve-by-eighteen haunch around the perimeter. The haunch has to be surrounded by R-board stuck vertically into the ground, and another sheet of r-board four feet wide has to be lain horizontally around the vertical R-board and covered with four feet of dirt.’
‘That sounds excessive’, Vergil said.
‘It’s a pain in the ass, but its venial’, the Founder said. ‘The mortal sin is that he says that the home’s skirting has to be flush with the vertical R-board. No slop. A reasonable guy would allow three inches on each side.’
‘We went metric in the last century.’
‘Well, good for you.’
The Founder removed both of the woman’s shoes and both of the steel-toed boots. He picked up a rubber truncheon lying next to the hole and hit the flesh that presented itself as hard as he could several times. A woman’s shriek and a man’s groan drifted up from underground. The arc of the moral universe is long, the Founder thought, but it tends toward justice.
‘What about the consultant’, Vergil asked. ‘Do you think he belongs here?’
‘Nah’, the Founder said. ‘He’s just sanctimonious. Cut him loose.’
The love child of Rube Goldberg and Trotsky….