[8 minute read. If you’d like to read a 14% shorter version, clocking in at 6 minutes, you can do so here. If you’re a Medium Member and would like to support my writing, please read it here.]
Last Christmas I visited my sister in Belgium, where I committed a parking violation and was given a short tour of hell.
The infringement itself was a joke. You fly out of Idaho Falls, connect in Denver and again in Chicago, land in Brussels, rent a little matchbox of a car, in which you drive for an hour through a landscape that looks like the inside of a computer, but foggy, and then they nail you for the three minutes parked directly in front of your sister’s apartment building, while you hug and said hi, before she comes down to direct you to a kosher parking spot around the corner.
I only found out that I’d been ticketed back home in Idaho. How they found me I have no idea. It wasn’t the car rental company that contacted me. It was a letter from some Belgian agency, in three languages.
€160. That must’ve been some prime parking estate. What is that in American? A handful of quarters? It just doesn’t seem worth the effort — the translators and the envelopes and the postage and the surveillance capitalism and everything.
But I’m a good guy, a law abiding citizen. I don’t imagine that the law ends at my own borders. Neither do my freedoms or my responsibilities.
After dinner that evening, I sat down and typed the URL of the Belgian agency for parking violations into our computer. A rerun of Citizen Kane was about to start on TCM in a few minutes, which I wrongly figured was ample time to wrap this thing up. Why did we go through the digital revolution, if not for ease and speed?
The trouble started right away, with CAPTCHA.
I musta solved 23 of those things. Without any success. Just a steady uptick in blood pressure. You’d think an old man capable of identifying a bridge and a bicycle.
Just to take a brief step backwards: why was this agency even using CAPTCHAs? Are there chat bots out there paying peoples’ parking tickets?
So there I was clicking away furiously, wondering whether half a traffic light is still a traffic light. I was in such a maelstrom of rage and confusion that I hardly registered the oddness of the next prompt: Select all images containing sigils of binding. I carried on clicking.
And just like that — Murphy, eat your ass out — I was in. The question is: in where?
The monitor flickered, smoke drifted out of the USB ports, and a polite voice intoned: “User verified. Invocation accepted.”
The next thing I knew there was a demon standing by my elbow.
It reeked of burnt sugar and looked like a cross between a Gremlin and Ganesha (an elephant-headed deity, to the religiously challenged). Its small dead eyes, reminiscent of an angler fish’s, made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
We both had the living daylights scared out of us. The seconds crept on, slow as treacle… yet no violence ensued. Hope germinated in my heart and I clutched at it.
The demon started jabbering away at me in a hodgepodge of rumbles and clicks. I couldn’t make horn or hoof of it. Nor he of my own fair tongue, which made his ears bleed.
An online translator saved the day. Through it, I told him that I was only trying to pay a parking ticket. That an insufferable CAPTCHA…
Krapsop (an English approximation of his name) nodded sympathetically and consulted a tablet.
“Ah yes, this damned thing again. We’re running a lotta software updates, a cascade actually. A bloody mess, I don’t mind telling you. One of the trickier bugs causes a superposition between one of our teleportation protocols and, for example, the e-government service you were trying to access.”
“So what the hell do we do now?”
“I have to log the exception and contact my boss, who has to get the clearance for reopening a portal, and then I’ll be off your hands. There’s no way around a certain amount of paperwork, I’m afraid, but nowadays we can zap it off digitally.
As for your ticket, we recommend that you wait until we’ve closed the case on our side before you go ahead and settle your account with the earth agency in question. Please feel free to retry their web services. In our experience it’s practically unheard of for lightning to strike twice.”
Of course he was on hold to Infernal Support for the rest of the afternoon. (I was surprised that their hold music was very poppy. I would’ve expected Dark Metal or Devil Metal, but no. It sounded like the Spotify Top 10.)
While he got started on the digital paperwork, I set up a small office for us in our woodshed, aired out the house, and lit scented candles. My wife was due home soon and if she found an elephant-headed demon stinking up the place as if Mr. Wonka’s factory had burned to the ground, all hell would break loose.
After half an eternity on hold, Krapsop found out that his boss was unavailable, on a leave of torture. I could tell something was wrong by the set of his little shoulders.
“Okay, we’ve run into some complications. I’m putting this case on Damnation Pending.
Let me break it down for you: although the time taken for teleportation approaches zero, the costs go in the opposite direction. Believe me.
Each supervisor has a small budget for this sort of thing, but they’re insanely stingy. Only for their favourite pets, and never for somebody else’s demon. Since my supervisor’s away our only option, if you don’t want to wait five moons, is to pay a fee.
Don’t worry. The fee is not exorbitant. It amounts to around 20 US dollars. We do not, however, accept national currencies. You may make you payment in Bitcoin, Ether, or, in a bind, we could also be persuaded to accept Dogecoin.”
I looked at him like he was soft in the head and said: “I’m an old man. I hardly know how to send a WhatsApp. How do expect me to send a Bitcoin? I don’t even know what a Bitcoin is!”
“Okay okay, no problem. We also have a very popular work-for-payment program.”
“Yea? How does it go?”
“You basically generate clickbait titles for us. It could be anything from news headlines to blog entry titles to straight up ads…”
“Let me stop you right there, sonny,” I said, and pointed at my own head with both of my index fingers. “Old man! That shit is all Greek to me. I read the papers once a week. An actual newspaper, do you understand? A boy on a bicycle delivers it to me.”
“Oh bloody hell…” The air went out of him. It stank. “You could try a sacrifice, as a last resort.”
“Yea? Sacrificing what?”
“Well, you can stop reaching for your humidor. And leave your whisky cabinet in peace. This is hell we’re talking about, not some pimp-my-African-border-crossing. Blood is the thing. Blood!”
“Shall I open a vein?”
“No no no, a son or a daughter (no parents), a bonded animal, a beast of burden, livestock.”
In the end I appealed to our local butcher and he reluctantly agreed to let me sit in, ritualistically, in the slaughter of a hog. I drew a large pentagram on his white-tiled floor, exactly centred on the drain. On the points of the pentagram I placed the following power objects:
- my wife’s old copper coil,
- our children’s milk teeth,
- a kidney stone I had passed,
- an ampule of Red Sea water, and
- a Carolina Reaper.
From my phone, I played a recording of Krapsop grunting and burbling an incantation, then streamed some Ace of Base, and then there was blood.
The bleeding was bad enough, but basically a foot rub in comparison to the skinning and gutting that came after it. I had to mobilise all of my resources just to keep my breakfast down.
There was no way I was drinking a quart of that stuff. I took some home, which my wife made into a nice black pudding.
I snuck a slice of it into my pocket, which I shared with Krapsop later that evening in the shed. It was cold by then and had bits of pocket lint sticking to it, but it did the job.
After swallowing the last bite, he closed the translator’s window, laid a hand on my shoulder, buzzed and squeaked a few lines, and then just faded away like some photographic trick.
It was an unintelligible but somehow moving farewell.
And I was of course also traumatized. I could not… I did not feel free to retry that Belgian agency’s web services. I called up my sister and begged her to go the place itself and pay the ticket in cash for me.
The Insane Coffee Project 
Leave a comment