The Seventh Circle
At the entrance to the next section, an officious-looking woman with a Canadian accent asked Vergil and the Founder if they were carrying any weapons.
They were not.
Did they know what a weapon was, the woman asked. Knives, firearms, pepper spray, brass knuckles, ice picks, cattle prods, bear repellant, e.g. This was a non-inclusive list. The category ‘weapon’ could denote several household items that our travelers could be carrying.
They knew what a weapon was, Vergil replied. They were not carrying one.
The woman asked the purpose of their visit. Vergil replied that he had been tasked by the highest authority to show the facility to the Founder.
Could he not show the Founder the facility on the other side of the gate, the woman asked. I mean, she said, there were things to see over there, as well as here.
Vergil could not, he explained, show the Founder the things over there over here.
She asked them for a list of schools that they had attended. She asked for a list of schools that they had not attended. That bothered Vergil. He shouted, Vous avez un cerveau fait de sirop d’érable! The way his eyes flashed as he spoke scared the Founder. He had never seen him this exercised. He considered holding him back to keep him from battering the woman about the ears and head, but when he reached out to restrain him, his hands passed through him. Le Québec était et sera toujours libre! Vergil continued. Nous nous battrons en France, nous nous battrons sur les mers et les océans, nous nous battrons sur les plages, nous nous battrons sur les terrains de débarquement, Nous ne nous rendrons jamais! Vive la France! Vive le Quebec libre!
The woman pulled back and pursed her lips. ‘Sorry’, she said, although she pronounced it ‘Sawrry’. ‘Vôtre père était un hamster et vôtre mère sentait de sureau’, Vergil grumbled as they walked by.
.
The landscape that greeted them was a series of hills and valleys that had been strip-mined. Self-driving heavy equipment tore the tops off mountains dumped the waste in the valleys. Another set of heavy equipment moved the earth from the valleys and put it back onto the mountains in the shape of ziggurats. At the edge of the brownfield, a river of dark liquid ran.
‘Is that blood’, the Founder asked.
‘Yup’.
As if in a James Bond action sequence, two jet skis appeared. ‘We used to use centaurs for this’, Vergil said, ‘But they were temperamental and we had to pay them.’
‘I like centaurs. I would like to come back as one’, the Founder said.
‘Centaurs are degenerates’, Vergil said. ‘Never trust a centaur. Don’t lend them money and don’t let them near your wife or girlfriend.’
‘What happened to the centaurs that were laid off’, the Founder asked. ‘I mean, they didn’t just vaporize.’
‘Not my job’, Vergil said. ‘And I don’t care.’
Just off the bank, standing in blood up to his chest, was a young man who the Founder recognized. He was twenty years old and had lived with a thirty-five-year-old woman in the park in central New York. The girlfriend had a sixteen-year-old son who was autistic. The son and the boyfriend would get into fights that destroyed the inside of her home. After she kicked him out, the boyfriend came back in the middle of the night and tried to take the metal roof panels off her home. Since he had installed them, he said, he wanted to take them with him.
‘What section is this’, the Founder shouted. Vergil was twenty feet in front of him and the jet ski motors were loud. Vergil turned his head quickly, shouted ‘Violence’, and turned his head back.
Farther in, a man who had lived in the park in northern New York stood in blood up to his neck. He had counterfeited money and tried to pay his lot rent in cash. Shortly before he left, he had attacked his wife with a baseball bat. The Founder shouted something at Vergil. Vergil cut his engine and idled. The Founder rode alongside him and cut his engine, too.
‘I said, Is the depth of the blood proportional to the severity of the crime’, the Founder asked.
‘Yes it is’, Vergil said, ‘Although it took us a while to calibrate it right.’
A minute later, the hull of the Founder’s jet ski bumped against something hard and round. When he saw that it was a human head, he grabbed it by the hair and pulled it above the surface. The head gasped for breath and opened its eyes. The Founder saw that it was a guy who had lived in his park in northern New York. He had lived in an older home with vertically-oriented aluminum siding. Next to the door was a head-shaped dent, where he banged his wife’s head when he was angry with her. After he tried to kill himself with a Sawzall in front of his wife and their two small children he spent two weeks in the psych ward, but his wife took him back when he promised to take his meds and go to therapy. The Founder pushed the head back into the liquid. There was nothing solid to smash it against and he couldn’t bring himself to say anything snarky to it.