Chapter VIII
Bari had told the cloud porpoise Hkmjaahumikimltgrchjzzen that he would give her a response by chapter eight. He was ready. In the past two chapters, he had mulled muchos cosas over. He had made a decision. And thus is how he came to it:
Clearly, he was in the position of deity. Deified he had been, and so defied he would not be. For many, this godliness and utmost obedience was all they could wish from this life. He could have anything he wanted just by asking for it. Many might wish to possess just a fraction of this status, but Bari found it to be rather cumbersome. Sure, he had managed to perform all the miracles asked of him, and even a little extra so far, but that duty and the reverence in which it was held had become a burden. He didn’t see it as a fair trade-off. Most of the islanders wished for fairly mundane things, things that he could usually pick up from the grocery store, and sometimes they wished for absolution, which was pretty easy to give as well. In return, he was, of course, treated as a god. Everything he wanted was brought to him in the timeliest of manners. But still, it was lacking.
He had once believed in a god. This was several years before our story, and at the time he was a young and impressionable teenager. He belonged to a church. At first, it was because he was a young child and had no choice, but in due time he was indoctrinated. He began to buy into all the nonsense, things that had he been thinking rationally, would have filled him with rage, or at least laughter. He performed his duties and gave up his earnings, as dutifully as any other because he believed that in the end there would be some sort of reward for all the toil, a reward much better than some sort of plaque or personalized pen. He had come to believe that it was better to let the joys of his current life bypass him, to make himself suffer and give up all that human nature told him was good, so that one day he might get a spot in the kingdom of god, probably as some sort of menial servant. He was satisfied with all this because it made him feel like he was a useful part of some holy scheme, like he was a vital organ, and no longer an appendix, and outside of this he had little to no connection to life. This was the perfect escape for one who was too shy, on foolish reasons, to go and take chances and to make something of himself and utilize his time alive. It was better to bow and to open his wallet and utter the proper words, for then he was looked upon with pride by his family and by the community around him.
And then, one day, he snapped out of it and came to his senses. This church had a story about the creation of the universe where the first two humans lived in a large garden. They lived there blissfully, though in ignorance of all wisdom and beauty outside of what their god had told them existed, until one day the GREAT EVIL ONE, in the guise of a snake, came to the woman. He explained some things to her. For example, that there was a tree that the god had told them not to eat the fruit of. This tree was called the tree of knowledge. Now, knowledge was not the fruit it bore, but supposedly the fruit contained within its skin the gift of knowledge of what was good and what was evil. The snake told the woman (I won’t name any names here, to protect the innocent) that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to eat this fruit. You know, maybe this god, though a gifted gardener, was just hording his best fruits. And hey, this woman and her husband had been doing all the work tending the gardens and feeding the animals lately anyway. She deserved a snack! So, she strolled over to the tree, whistling nonchalantly, and picked a fruit. It might have been an apple. The details have gotten somewhat mixed up over the course of the years.
“This is such a delicious fruit, and clearly loaded with knowledge, in addition to essential vitamins and nutrients” she thought and rushed back to her husband with the knowledge of knowledge.
So, he took a bite, and thought the same thing. He also acquired knowledge. Now, because of this, their god expelled them from the garden, made them mortal, and made it so that the woman would have to bleed from her vagina once every month and the man would have to toil in the fields every day just to make ends meet.
Thinking about this take on the classic story, Bari realized one day that he was being taught to be an idiot, that they preached that to live in a state of grace, people had to be dumb. Was stupidity truly gracious? This did not make sense, and he refused to believe any further. And over the years they had waged countless wars, had set up inquisitions to seek out and destroy those they deemed heretical, and had wiped out most indigenous races all over the globe. If he continued down that path, would he be drafted into the next crusade, whatever form it might take? No, he was overjoyed at the revelation that it wasn’t wrong to feel human passions, to enjoy being alive and not punish oneself for it, to prefer the taste of that first bite of pizza or the feeling of climbing up massive antlers to feel the cool summer breeze over the stiff heat in the church.
“Hey, this is pretty cool”, was what he thought.
Indeed, the revelation was astounding, and as he remembered it, he knew what he had to do. Sure, he had been a benevolent god, but he could just as soon turn into that denying, wrathful, jealous deity he had worshipped in the past. Such was the course of action most rulers took. Sure, they start off nice and being “for the people”, and then next thing you know they’re leading mass genocides. This was not the path that appealed to him. He liked to think that he was impervious to the corruption of power, but hey, why take a chance? And regardless of benevolence, he was nonetheless a fraud. He had to tell the truth to those poor people before it was too late, before they lost more of their time worshipping the likes of him in vain. He was also pretty curious about those cloud porpoises. In addition, gods were forbidden to grow facial hair in those days, much like soldiers or other jobs where one is required to be “well kept”, and he hated having to shave.
So, he gathered up the Islanders, and they circled about him, hoping that perhaps the day of judgment was en route, and that he was about to take them away to paradise. Instead, they had a severe letdown, as he merely told them his tale, from the point where he had leapt from the lunar surface with suicidal intentions. By the time he got to the part where the shark had torn him apart and he awoke to find himself levitating above them, they had collectively reached the decision that he was the one whom they called Ransyj, which in English means the devil, Satan, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, or Beelzebub. Obviously, he had tricked them into worship, and now was the time for him to repent. He was confessing because these were indeed times in which even the evil ones had consciences. Never mind that he had not asked to be worshipped. All this godliness had just been a prank played on him, and now he was reaping the punishment that was due to the true prankster. And though he repented, so did the heretics before they were killed in the inquisition, and so, as they, he needed to be destroyed. Oh, how that would please the true holy one, and maybe even prevent them from being stricken with plague, famine, or a losing baseball team. Thus a mighty angry mob was assembled, according to the strict rules which govern angry mobs, being that one third of the members must carry torches, one third pitchforks, and the last third arbitrary household objects to be used as weapons. Collectively they moved in on him, deriding him and seeming ever closer to ending his life with every step.
But, out in space, a moderately powerful magician took pity on this poor soul, though it was not usually his habit to do so. Normally he’d let false deities perish so that he would have less competition, though he was one himself. Nevertheless, he had gotten Bari into this conundrum by assembling his parts, and he appeared before the islanders to tell his tale. And when he finished they decided that he was the second part of the unholy trinity, and to round out the line-up they chose the burger he’d brought with him. These fools! They didn’t recognize the one they had worshipped for thousands of years. But, he had a history of lying; he had done so for millennia, so why should they believe him when he finally came clean? They also had a history of believing foolish things, so why should they believe a logical thing? And all this just compounded into their attempt to lynch him and his burger. So, he conjured up the most powerful
bit of magic that he could, and turned them all into pretzels, with the philosophy that if you can’t be intelligent, you might as well be edible. And this magician felt much better having come clean, and knowing that the ones who had eaten him for all these years were now food themselves, and picked one up for him and one for Bari, and conjured some nacho cheese, and they sat down to talk.
Between bites, the magician told Bari that since he had brought him back to life, he also had within him the power to bring him back to death, or if he so chose, he could just continue living, with a decent pension and insurance plan. To Bari, at this point, the choice was clear. While he had once wanted death, now the only option was to live, and he had a pension, which was pretty rare at his age, for he had been a deity. He wasn’t sure what he’d be making, but maybe there was the option he wouldn’t have to go back to that job if he once again returned home. He was so exuberant that he signed all the paperwork put before him, not realizing that he shouldn’t just be giving out his social security number to random strangers. Oh well. Hopefully this magician was to be trusted. He did seem to have turned over the proverbial new leaf. And come through he did. In fact, Bari began receiving checks regularly, though it turned out the pension was not in the form of currency, but in a free lifetime subscription to the periodical of his choice, and a check which was indeed just a voucher for one free burger every week and optional fries for only fifty cents from Larry’s Burger Elephant. In the wake of the departure of the magician, his friend Hkmjaahumikimltgrchjzzen, who had been waiting the rest of the chapter for that altercation to end, returned to whisk him off to the clouds. He was given a sweater vest and up they went!
Over the years it had come to pass that the cloud porpoises resided in what is colloquially known as a utopia. The problem with places like that is that people just don’t have much interest in hearing about them, so long as they exist. They want to hear about places where the “action” is, where murder and horrid actions are common. To them, most utopias exist mostly as things to be nostalgic about when they’re long gone. Nobody wants to live in one, just to wish that they lived in one. They don’t find a peaceful existence to be a very interesting thing, but once they themselves are in trouble they like to think back fondly of what used to be. Bari, though, was quite find of this utopia from the moment that he arrived. They welcomed him without even the mildest apprehension, and he had not experienced such a welcome in the entire course of his lifetime. He had generally met hostility wherever he went. These were generally tough days for Juiceboxes. Having adjusted to their way of life, he found that what he appreciated most was the many arts that the cloud porpoises excelled in, which included, but are not limited to: carpentry (the construction of furniture and buildings and other objects, often with wood), carpetry (the making of carpets), carpitry (the making of carp, a fish of the order cypriniformes and family cyprinidae), and carpoetry (poetry regarding all of the above subjects). He knew he could be quite satisfied living amongst these cloud-abiding cetaceans. However, much like with the triangles of the chapters of yore, evenfall was dawning on the golden age of the cloud porpoises, and Baritone Juicebox was to at least enjoy living in this crepuscule. The more he assimilated into the culture of the cloud porpoises, the more he became like them, and eventually he had, like Hkmjaahumikimltgrchjzzen, the ability to switch, at will, between the body of a human and that of a cloud porpoise. One of the elders of the society, who had taken a fondness to Bari, even knitted him his own sweater, replete with a dinosaur themed pattern.
During those years he rejoiced in living the life of a cloud porpoise, not at all missing the now non-existent human society. In this time he would often swim through the clouds with his closest friend amongst the porpoises, who had also once ben human and had entered her shower in search of Don Henley. Many things they found they had in common, not only with their similar stories of transformation, but also in their natures. During the span of time which made up their swimming adventures, they would often swap tales, for they found each other’s stories fascinating, and then they would swap tails, to see how it affected their swimming. There was much free time and leisure to be had in this society, for there was no need for a job, such as the humans valued so much. They built their homes out of the clouds, which were always renewing, and all the food that they required they were able to grow out of the fertile soil that the clouds provided them with. Therefore, an extra forty hours per week was freed up to devote to the activities of their own choosing. That’s not to say that the cloud porpoises are lazy creatures. The opposite is in fact true. They are very hard working, but only work hard at that which is necessary, and don’t seek to abuse the labour of the other porpoises. And those forty hours a week that were now free? Well, over the course of the thousands of years which the porpoises lived, they were enabled to think a whole lot more, their minds not being clouded by the thought of what useless paperwork they needed to fill out, but only clouded by physical clouds, which provided a refreshing mist. With all this thinking, they attained roughly dodeca-sentience.
Now, being so wise, they had never had need for weapons or war. They lived from away from the knowledge of any potential predators or conquerors, and they had no fights amongst each other. Every once in a while there would be a quarrel, as not every cloud porpoise held the same opinions on every topic, but the minor ones were oft-resolved by logical discussion, and the major ones were taken to a three part competition consisting of a chess match, a wrestling match, and a poetry reading, with whoever one two of the three being declared the winner of the argument. Most of the time, though, arguments were not occurring, and the porpoises were pooling their collective resources and abilities together to advance themselves in whatever areas suited their interests best. Some discovered wonderful new medicines that resided in the flora which grew from the clouds, and the cloud porpoises lived lives much past the range of the human life, and were healthy for the vast majority of that time. Indeed, the oldest recorded cloud porpoise was named Olundark, and he was a famous carpoet who finally kicked the bucket at nine thousand, four hundred, and thirty seven years of age. Others devoted themselves to the arts, and produced the finest literature, music, paintings, drawings, sculptures, and et cetera that had ever been seen or heard upon the Earth. With this unbounded freedom of choice, many amongst them became renowned in the culinary arts, in science, in physical prowess, and a few select ones excelled in cloud breeding, which was held to be an extremely important facet of survival. See, as we all know, clouds are evanescent. Their existence is fleeting, and their life as fixtures in the sky never lasts too long, and so the most highly skilled cloud porpoises often took on the task of seeding unclouded areas of the sky to grow clouds suitable for porpoise life. Now, as with every good thing there are always a few negatives, and not every cloud porpoise lived to the best of its abilities, but those that didn’t were few and generally harmless. They were usually just lazy, and drifted amongst the clouds, learning nothing, and practicing nothing, and the ones that cared little enough would often just fade into the clouds, becoming as thoughtless as they. It was rare that any cloud porpoise had malevolent intentions.
This was one main difference between humans and cloud porpoises: the porpoises could not be so easily swayed to any cause, and so on the occasions when one had evil intentions, they would often just become frustrated while trying to convince the others to join them in order to rule the world and poison the supply of something or engage in some sort of mass murder. They would usually just give up and become clouds or descend to the human world and join those who they had more in common with.
As was mentioned before, human society had somewhat recently been destroyed by World War 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971. Between the nuclear bombs of one side and the poison sandwich bombs of the other, about 79.3 per cent of humans on the planet had been killed, all over a foolish arm wrestling match. The remnants had been forced to take to the sea and wander, hoping to find land that was both
hospitable to them and not poisoned.
It was long before they noticed the crepuscular rays. These were also known as Jacob’s ladder. A human book called the bible says that this is because a fellow named Jacob viewed them as ladders to heaven, but this is what actually happened: a scientist named Oliver Calipherneus Jacob discovered that these rays of light coming down from the sun through the clouds could be climbed, and that the clouds were habitable until they began to dissolve, upon which they would normally just give you a rather kindly eviction notice.
And so it was that a rather cruel and wicked man, who had once been a cloud porpoise knew how to access their realm, who was named Gjorthondolad, for that meant “evil enemy of the porpoises”, descried the crepuscular rays, and spoke of the wonders to be found in the sky, and the people,being wretched and weary, were prone to believe the words of wicked men because they could ease their suffering. And so it was that a few men, soon to be followed by the remnants of civilization, ascended Doctor Oliver Calipherneus Jacob’s ladder, and viewed for themselves the realm of the cloud porpoises.