God and Santa Claus Trump Trump: A Christmas Tale of Generosity, Love, and Redemption
Date: 2017-01-09 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Literature & Fiction; Literary; Science Fiction & Fantasy; Fantasy; Paranormal & Urban; Contemporary Fiction
Description: Uh-oh! God the Father’s done wigged out. Santa’s just reported that the entire tone and texture of Earth has darkened, in the USA especially, on his Christmas rounds this year. It seems a would-be tyrant is gearing up to tyrannize. America’s democratic republic teeters on its last legs, this mockery of a man having rent its fabric, perhaps irreparably, in the weeks since his highly suspect election. Checks and balances? Out the window. Sexists, racists, anti-Semites, science deniers, homophobes, fake Christians, and bigots of every stripe feel emboldened to publicly trot out the cockroach natu
Publisher: Lambent Light Publishing

God and Santa Claus
Trump Trump

A Christmas Tale of Generosity,
Love, and Redemption

Robert Devereaux

Copyright © 2017 Robert Devereaux

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover Illustration by Dean Samed

Visit the author’s website at www.robertdevereaux.com.

Lambent Light Publishing
www.lambentlightpublishing.com

I dedicate this exercise in fantasy to the human family, united as one, on this earthly plane. I single out especially those in panic, pain, rage, or mourning over the horrendous and unacceptable elevation of this unworthy soul to the highest office in the land. Remember always that, in spite of his warped view of himself, he now becomes a servant of the people, not your overlord in any way. Know that and, with steadfast resolve, remind him of it constantly and hold him to that standard. May all of us be blessed with
the patience, endurance, and strength
to see us through these troubled times.

“Peacemaking is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful, arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice. It is about a revolution of love that is big enough to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free.”

- Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Enuma Okora, Common Prayer: A Liturgy
for Ordinary Radicals

.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Zero

Prologue in Heaven

Chapter One

An Empty Suit Sits in the Oval Office

Chapter Two

Trump’s Tyrannical Jizzfest Interrupted

Chapter Three

Why Are You Guys Here?

Chapter Four

First Attempt: The Compulsive Liar

Chapter Five

Second Attempt: War and Peace

Chapter Six

Third Attempt: Uniting and Dividing

Chapter Seven

Fourth Attempt: The Nurturing Father

Chapter Eight

Fifth Attempt: Fake Religion as Oppressor

Chapter Nine

Sixth Attempt: Reverence Toward Women

Chapter Ten

Seventh Attempt: Preserving the Planet

Chapter Eleven

Santa Struggles to Maintain His Optimism

Chapter Twelve

God in His Deepest Funk Ever

Chapter Thirteen

A Desperate Gathering of Saviors

Chapter Fourteen

One Last Attempt to Fix the Unfixable Fucker

Chapter Fifteen

God Almighty Brings the Author Onstage

Chapter Sixteen

Immortal Reflections

Chapter Seventeen

Trump’s Road to Damascus Moment

A Plaintive Afterword

On the State of the Union

Chapter Zero

Prologue in Heaven

When Saint Nicholas showed up unexpectedly at the foot of his throne, God the Father was, shall we say, somewhat put out.

Aw, hell, let’s he honest.

Almighty God was pissed, peeved, and perplexed.

He thundered and snapped at the usually-but-not-right-now jolly old elf. “What is it now? Fucking race of human fuckers is my bet. All right, spill the beans. Who did what to whom this time?”

Santa delivered the bad news, adding, “It was all done by a bunch of wankers who never managed to get off my naughty list.”

“They put that idiot up for election to the most powerful position in the world?”

“Yes.”

“And he won?”

“In a manner of speaking, though he’s really a minor-league president-elect who lost to another candidate by nearly three million popular votes.”

“Christ!”

The Son immediately appeared. “Yes, Father?”

“Oh, shut up. I wasn’t addressing you. You did enough damage on your little adventure down there. And stop flashing those fucking palm gashes before the heavenly host. They impress no one.”

The Son, giving a hangdog look, vanished.

Santa explained further what had happened in the last months of 2016.

“They don’t believe in science?” God the Father gaped in incredulity. “Or they pretend not to, lest spouting such beliefs might block their labial access to the buttocks of the rich? Fucking dolts!”

Santa put the best face he could on this Trump character.

If he dredged deep enough and downplayed the countless layers of crap slathered over the man’s personality, he could contrive to come up with some slight measure of generosity in depicting him.

But, let’s face it.

When you’re tarting up a pig, at some point, you simply run out of lipstick.

“Nice try, Nicholas,” said God. “No cigar. They don’t call you a saint for nothing.”

Santa went further into the political absurdities happening on planet Earth.

With each new insanity the jolly old elf reeled off, God the Father grew increasingly upset. At last, he let out such a sudden, high-decibeled bellow of bitch and bile that the angel choirs, caught mid-song, left off their hosannas and hallelujahs, glanced stupidly about at one another, then resumed.

And God sighed. “I suppose divine intervention is called for. Who shall it be this time and what sort?”

The Son began to materialize, but the Father, with a sweeping gesture of dismissal, dismissed him and he at once backed off and winked out.

Santa said, “I’d be happy to—”

“Yes, yes. You and I, initially at least.”

He glanced sharply over. “Wait a minute. I thought you’d fixed those seven billion goddamned human psyches, you and your elves, the Easter Bunny, Hephaestus—and finally Aphrodite, giving you such a vast quantity of exquisite fucks to help you guarantee the integrity of them all.

“What the hell happened?”

Saint Nick’s face reddened. “I dropped in on Hephaestus. He took a closer look at the active clones in the psyche factory. Then he compared them to the actual psyches on earth.

“It seems they’ve developed a disconnect.”

“Seems?”

“Have developed. Up here, they look perfect. Down there? Royally screwed up.”

“And how long have you known about this?”

“Well we . . . I mean I . . . took my eye off the ball. I thought everything would be perfect. But now I see that that was a false hope. Their psyches are exceptionally stubborn. Resist change. We’ve got some sort of bug in our system. Hephaestus is checking it out right now.”

“Any evidence of mayhem from the Tooth Fairy, her imps, or any of her nasty recruits?”

“None. The psyches seem to have fallen back from a state of perfection all on their own.”

“And would I be correct in assuming that you’ve kept on fucking the Goddess of Love—to the tune of, what is it, a million and a half per week—in order to shore up the psyches of newborns? That you’ve done so, knowing that every last one of those psyches is disconnected from its original on earth?”

Santa averted his eyes. “Well, Aphrodite is an exceptionally beautiful goddess. And I’ve long ago reconciled myself to having once been Pan, King of the Satyrs.

“Insatiable him and therefore me.”

God scoffed, “Water under the bridge. Hephaestus is on board with your bedding his wife over and over and ad nauseam over again.

“Let’s put together a plan and head on down there now!”

Chapter One

An Empty Suit
Sits in the Oval Office

Hi, there.

Have a look-see at my version of Donald Trump as he sits here in my rendition of the Oval Office.

I’m your narrator for this little fantasy tale. I’ll pop in every so often for a direct comment.

Maybe I’ll even appear in person late in the book, once Donald has been transformed into his better self.

Oops, a spoiler!

One more thing: Be advised that this novel is not safe for children. None of this author’s Santa Claus novels are safe for children. But then neither is the current political climate.

Hell, that ain’t safe for anybody.

Welcome to the People’s House, otherwise known as the White House.

And welcome to the Oval Office, where momentous decisions—far too many of them horrendous and hostile to our interests, but a significant few beneficial not just to us but to the planet as a whole—are arrived at.

Here sits Donald Trump, a portly gentleman—well okay, stop laughing, a big fat pig.

“How can I best demean this fucking place?” he wonders. “Make it my own?”

But let’s shift over into his point of view, shall we?

***

Before God and Santa manifested in the Oval Office, Trump sat musing. He had commanded solitude absolute.

He surveyed the room’s oval shape. As he sat centered just so at the desk, his head occupied the clitoral position, a pencil eraser at the top of a far too wide vulva. Maybe narrow the room, ditch the chairs, no need for visitors, make all the decisions himself in this soon-to-be-tightened little pussy.

President Trump’s excitable inner sanctum.

Perhaps he could whip out his stubby little cock and jack off on this desk.

But no.

That would require Viagra and some coconut oil, and there was too little time for the blue pill to take effect.

His fucking aides had their dicks tied in knots, salivating over First Day Project and undoing as many of Obama’s executive orders as possible.

But to hell with that shit, he thought. We’ll get into destroying the country soon enough, as soon as my family drops in, I toss them out, and my pack of handpicked wolves comes snarling in here, slavering and sycophanting about my ass.

Time to savor that top-of-the-world feeling. Ain’t no higher position on the whole goddamned planet.

I could fuck any woman I want right here. Find that crazed cunt-bitch who shoved her wailing rug rat at me, toss that bawling bundle of meat to the lions, and force her to suck me off right here, right where that what-the-fuck-was-she-an-intern-or-something licked Bill’s shitty little asshole.

Trump stopped.

Some vague shapes were swimming into view.

What the fuck?

Things were going all wonky.

Had someone spiked his punch?

Chapter Two

Trump’s Tyrannical Jizzfest Interrupted

At Santa’s suggestion, God had toned down the effect of his presence, hoping not to destroy, by virtue of being such a powerful and overwhelming presence, the human being to whom they were about to read the riot act.

Now, the two of them were in magic time.

Magic time allows beings benevolent and malevolent to move unseen among humanity, distributing gifts to billions of children in one night, for example, or bartering coins for teeth.

God and Santa were in magic time, but Trump was not.

Not yet.

He was, you might say, frozen in time.

Now here comes a very embarrassing part of my narrative. But trust me, I’m only reporting the truth of what happened. No unreliable narrator, I.

You see, when God took in, in full, the vile nature of the man seated behind the big, important-looking desk, he . . . well—let’s just out with it, so to speak—he projectile-vomited. And God’s vomit came within a quarter of an inch of hitting Trump’s face.

Now perhaps you suppose that his puke stopped short of Trump’s face because I’m avoiding depicting an ugly act against a newly anointed leader.

Quite the contrary.

For God eats nothing but pure energy.

That being so, his vomit has no stink. Is perhaps healing in its touch. There’s no way to know, since God so rarely loses his energetic lunch.

In any case, the Fates decided that Trump, at this stage of his arrested development, was unworthy of the Heavenly Father’s shower of puke.

Later in the story? Perhaps.

God inhaled grandly to draw back his vomit, every sacred droplet, reversing the reverse peristalsis he’d experienced a moment before.

“What did I just do?” asked God in astonishment.

“You purged,” said Santa. “Out the front end. I see that all the time on my rounds, cute little kids so excited at the thought of my nocturnal visit that they upchuck their dinners and have to be cleaned up and put to bed, sobbing and comforted.”

God gave a look of disgust. “If the psyches had been fixed properly, this clown wouldn’t be sitting here. No one would have voted for his royal incompetence. And governance worldwide, let alone here, wouldn’t be befouled by all manner of Machiavellian bullshit. Nope. There’d be utopias everywhere, deliciously manifesting all of humankind’s highly touted but just about universally ignored virtues of peace, love, and understanding. Don’t get me started!”

“May I again offer an apology?” said Santa.

“Hephaestus has got to see this. Just a second.”

God gestured into the air, and Hephaestus appeared. The smith was burly and ugly, his beard wild and unkempt, his legs broken from Zeus having tossed him off Mount Olympus ages ago, but well balanced in elaborate gold servomechanisms, his eyes ferocious and fiery yet rich with compassion.

“Whoa, what the hell am I doing here? I have a shitload of work to do in the psyche factory. This better be good.”

“Stuff your work. We’ve got problems with this particular corner of humanity.”

“The goddamned human race?” said the smith. “Harrumph! Bunch of recalcitrant motherfuckers.”

“Take a look at this man.”

Hephaestus, repulsed, glanced at the combed-back loser behind the desk. “This unworthy fuck? This nonentity? Why are we bothering with him?”

God took Hephaestus aside and gave him a crash course in earthly geopolitics, focusing especially on the nation-state in which they now stood.

“And this guy?”

“Look deep into his psyche.”

“Do I have to?”

“Look!”

The ruddy-faced Hephaestus turned increasingly whiter shades of pale as he braved the sight of this mutant psyche’s vast landscape of awfulness.

Hephaestus gaped.

He gasped.

He forgot to breathe,

Then he swore a blue streak, a red streak, and an ultraviolet streak. “I thought we fixed these, all of them, worldwide. Be right back.”

* * *

Okay, now. Time out.

Alert readers—that would be all of you—astutely recall from the prologue in heaven that Hephaestus already knew about this snafu.

So why is he surprised here?

Good call!

To confess, I have—or rather the author has—written this novella in all haste against a deadline, that being the shameful day of inauguration.

Such mix-ups occur in early drafts with amazing frequency, usually to be patched up in later drafts.

We’ve decided to leave both passages be.

Think of it as a hiccup of dream logic . . . or as the imperfect stitch in all Persian rugs.

We, the author and I, here offer our minima mea culpa.

Cool?

Okay, then.

Back up and off we go!

* * *

Then he swore a blue streak, a red streak, and an ultraviolet streak. “I thought we fixed these, all of them, worldwide. Be right back.”

The burly blacksmith winked out, then in, holding his clone of the Trump psyche, a sphere standing a foot and a half tall. “Take a gander. This is what his clone in the psyche factory looks like. Should be an exact match. Didn’t we fix the goddamned human race a few years back?”

God gestured into the air and said, “You tell me. Scan the world.”

Hephaestus scanned. “Holy shit!”

“No such thing. I neither take nor give a shit. And until I saw this dreadful, wankeresque specimen of a human being, the same was true of my puke.”

God glared. “Now explain that,” he said, pointing into the heart of Trump.

Hephaestus popped out a clone, this time of the man’s current psyche, a sphere of the same size, but boy oh boy, was it a mess.

Hephaestus gave a low whistle. “Beats me. We had them, as always, perfectly in synch. This is a total cockup. I remember his psyche now. But what it has turned into is even worse than I recall. Let me give close scrutiny to them both.”

He bent to the task, examining first one, then the other. His sure hands pried open each psyche and peered inside.

He shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s almost as if the old psyche, bad as it was, fought back against the fixes we tried earlier. As if it dug in its heels, turned its back, and found the vilest swamp it could to wallow in and get all defiantly mucky.

“With your permission, I’m going to head back to the psyche factory with these two specimens and figure out just where the disconnect is, not only for this psyche but for all the world’s psyches.”

“Go ahead,” God said. “But be snappy about it.”

Chapter Three

Why Are You Guys Here?

Trump’s first instinct was to wet his pants. But he resisted.

As the two figures came clearly into view, he knew at once who they were.

He felt surer than ever that he had been drugged.

Damned security fuckers falling down on the job.

Yet he felt neither stupefied nor groggy but quite alive, more alive than he’d felt in a long time.

“If I’m not mistaken,” he said, “I believe I have the honor of welcoming into my office Santa Claus and God Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, or are you really as powerful as all that?”

Santa was about to speak, but he allowed God the privilege of beginning the conversation.

“That’s very perceptive for a sorry son of a bitch like yourself,” said God. “But I suppose Santa’s red suit and my flowing divine robes, not to mention my long white beard, must have given away the game right away.”

“My, you’re rather blunt.”

“No other way to be than blunt with someone like you. While you rarely speak true, I always do. Well, maybe not one hundred percent to Neale Donald Walsch.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

“Donald,” said Santa with a twinkle in his eye, “may I say it’s a privilege to be in your presence, even though, since you’ve been without fail on my naughty list your entire life, I’ve never once given you any presents. Watched you sleep, though.”

Trump was absolutely taken by Santa Claus.

His radiant joy and overflowing generosity made Trump instantly want to befriend and hang out with the jolly old saint.

“Let’s get to the point of our visit,” said God the Father. “We’re going to do our level best to change you into someone worthy of the chair you’re sitting in. Right now, I can’t think of anyone less worthy.”

“I see,” said Trump. “Just a tad judgmental of you, yes?”

“Well, since I’m the highest judge of all, according to those master legal theoreticians, Rogers and Hammerstein, judgment is part of my game. You might call it the central part of my game.”

Said Trump, “If you agree not to pull rank on me, I’ll agree not to pull rank on you.”

God glowered at the mortal’s temerity. “Fuck you, you miserable piece of shit.”

“Hey, dude, watch what you call me. By God I’ll nuke heaven if you don’t curb your tongue.”

The Almighty looked aghast.

“Donald’s not joking,” said Santa softly.

God peered inside the newly minted leader and saw the insanity coiled in wait there, just beneath the onion-paper-thin skin and the fragile ego.

“That’s it,” he said decisively to Santa. “We’re staying. Game on. And by God, we’d better win it.”

Chapter Four

First Attempt:
The Compulsive Liar

It was difficult for God to conceal his annoyance.

Long ago, he had created these creatures, all of them with abundant potential. And nearly all had squandered their potential on trivialities, on gossip, violence, anger, or fear—wasting, wasting, wasting their time and talents on pointless pursuits, their creative wellsprings having long gone dry.

Now here was this motherfucking asshole, this malignant narcissist, this little diminutive nothing of a man, this nonpareil of nonentities, this dolt, this treasonous, sociopathic oligarch, so full of himself, so much so that he had no room for anything or anyone else.

Instead of cowering before the Almighty, as he should be doing, he sat there smug, belligerent, full of warp and woe, one of the worst specimens of humanity it had ever been God’s misfortune to chance upon.

Said Trump, “This change you’re planning to put me through, how’re you supposed to bring that about? Just going to talk me through it? Or will you wave your all-powerful hands and make me over without me having to do a thing? Because, let me tell you, if I have any say in it, you’ll never change me one bit. In fact, fuck you for daring to suggest any change at all is required. I’m perfect as I am. That’s why I’m now the most powerful man on the planet.”

God bit his tongue and pretended not to hear the atheistic motherfucker’s blasphemous bullshit. “We have a workman, Hephaestus, who handles psyches in heaven, without rest. In his psyche factory, he keeps a living clone of every psyche on the planet. He creates new ones for newborns and archives old ones when anyone dies. He’s already been here and took away a clone of your psyche. But he did request that we call him in, so he could suggest the best way to change you, using a combination of talk from your creator—that would be me—and expert tinkering on his part.”

Trump laughed. “Bring the son of a bitch on.”

God gestured.

And Hephaestus reappeared in the Oval Office, bold and blustery as ever.

* * *

Santa watched as Aphrodite’s spouse once more swam into view.

He admired Hephaestus as a tireless, exacting worker, a being with sinewy hands and a heart of gold.

His psyches—both the under-psyche everyone shared and the over-psyche that gave each of us a distinct personality—were engineered to perfection.

Now it was true, thought Santa, that they’d had some problems, given God’s lost-in-the-mists-of-time, original design of the under-psyche, a hasty botch in many areas.

But those problems had, they thought, been ironed out.

“Welcome back, Hephaestus,” said Santa.

Without ceremony, the burly immortal strode into the conversation. “Well, I have to say that this thing,” he said, producing the clone of Trump’s psyche, “is one hell of a motherfucking, son-of-a-bitch piece of work, a disaster in the making and a far greater disaster straight ahead into the near future.”

“This gimp doesn’t mince words, does he?”

Ignoring the man’s tone-deaf language and his thoughtless cruelty, Hephaestus continued, “Take a look at the internals here. Let me pry back the cover and show you what we’re up against.”

Santa was stunned how tortured and raw the psyche looked. Inside, he saw what could only be described as stunted whirligigs. Where the parts obviously ought to have been rigid, thick, and robust, they were all nearly short, thin, flaccid, floppy, wizened, and weak. Were they in a contest for integrity and strength, they would lose and lose badly.

“Holy Christ!” said God the Father.

The Son began to manifest. And God turned to him with a tired look in his eyes. “If ever I want you, I will make it plain to you. Speaking your name for emphasis is not the way I will make it plain to you. Now get the hell out of here.”

And the Son faded away completely.

“Take a gander at these areas, the worst of a well-nigh uncountable bunch,” said Hephaestus. “There’s so much wrong with this psyche. But if you can manage to change these seven spots, there’s a good chance the rest of this nightmare will clear up of its own accord. See which ones I’m talking about? The mechanism is similar in all these spots. The fix as well. But I’d say, keep these two until last, that is to say, first, the dishonoring of women, and second, the who-gives-a-shit attitude toward the death of the planet and the science that may prevent that death.

He pointed at various places inside the psyche. “Do you remember creating these mechanisms?”

“I do,” said God. “Journeyman work. Hack work. That was during my phallic phase, a short period, summer of 1946.”

He didn’t intend it as an excuse for what they were witnessing. Nor did anyone take it as an excuse. It was simply the truth.

God continued, “All right, let’s go with your plan. And let’s start with the first of the seven spots. The tendency to tell—good God, the obsession with telling—as many lies as possible in as short a time as possible.

“In fact, prevarication seems to be at the heart of this man’s warped soul.”

* * *

Trump took motherfucking umbrage at such a statement. And he was ready to say so. But he held his tongue, curious to see where this so-called deity was headed with this line of bullshit.

The gimp with the restructured legs announced that he’d be tinkering with that part of the psyche involving truth telling and lying.

And that God should go ahead and start reading this sad excuse for a human being the riot act.

My, my, mused Trump. Such bold and judgmental motherfuckers. Were he not in what they had called magic time, he would summon security at once to have them hauled away.

Raising himself to an absurd height, Almighty God launched into this diatribe: “Where do I begin with you, you non-stop tosser of word salads? You claim to have given over one hundred million dollars to charity. But you’ve been reckoned the least charitable billionaire in the United States by a review of your foundation’s Internal Revenue Service returns.”

Trump said, “That review was very unfair, very unfortunate, not at all to be believed. I give scads of money to charities all the time, probably more than anyone in the entire world.”

“Right. Sure. Moving on. You claim the murder rate is at a forty-five year high, when in fact it's close to a fifty-year low.”

“My claim is the God’s honest truth. I stand by my statement. Believe me, you Almighty Blusterer, I’ve never told a lie in my life, not a single one, just like good old George Washington and his pop-her-cherry tree.”

“Give me a fucking break!” said God. “You’ve said the Bible’s your favorite book, yet you can’t quote a single verse. Admit it, you’re a bullshit artist.”

Trump said, “My love for your exquisite book—and may I say I love your choice of language—simply stops my words from coming, I am so overwhelmed by its majesty and truth.”

“Spare me your bullshit.”

As Hephaestus tinkered away at the man’s psyche, Trump felt strange inside, not an unpleasant feeling as of being violated, but as if the burly hands of this cripple, as crude as they seemed from viewing them, were attempting a quite exquisite healing inside of him.

“You once said you didn’t believe you needed to be forgiven for anything, that you just needed to drink your little wine and chew your little cracker. Why ask for forgiveness, you said, if you weren’t making any mistakes?”

“Yep, that’s just about right. Though in the odd minute, as opposed to the even ones, I may hold exactly the opposite opinion. And I’d express it with the same unstoppable energy.”

“In other words, you have no moral compass. None at all.”

“So far, you’re making a pretty weak case. Is that all the ammunition you have? Isn’t it time you hauled your sorry asses out of here?”

“Your lies, you puny little human being, are legion. There’s no end to them. You’re a con man, plain and simple. There is no truth in you at all. You are a man who makes contracts and fails to honor them. You are a man who hires small companies on major construction projects, fails to pay them, and watches them—or rather fails to watch them—fall into bankruptcy. In short, in the area of lies and damned lies, you are one sorry human being.”

“Name one lie. I’ll bet you can’t.”

“You once said you saw thousands of people in Jersey City—”

“Cheering as the World Trade Center came down. That’s a fucking lie. I never said that.”

God gestured and that portion of Trump’s past played back, right in front of the bewigged fucker’s eyes.

“Well aren’t you the great and powerful Oz? You can clearly invent anything you like. A fake replay, for example.”

“Look at it. Listen to it.” God played it back at a higher volume.

“Well I don’t believe it.”

“What do you mean, you don’t believe it?”

“I choose not to believe it.”

God exasperated loudly. “Don’t you ever confess to anything? Don’t you ever repent or regret?”

“Those words, those noises, they mean nothing to me.”

At that, the Almighty threw up his hands and floated away in disgust.

* * *

Hephaestus focused entirely on that portion of the psyche that involved lying.

It was a challenging manipulation to repair, and the parts that made up the mechanism behind lying were twisted, tricky to touch, tricky to bend, and not at all amenable to a permanent fix.

He swore as softly as possible. “Damn.”

It became clear, despite some minor successes he had while God and Trump talked, that he would need his special tool belt. And that it were best to set up a small workbench off to Trump’s right.

“I’m sorry to say,” he said, “that it’s impossible, with my skilled hands alone, to fix this first part of Trump’s psyche. Before you proceed to the second one, please allow me to head back to the psyche factory and return with a few things I think will help.”

He saw the look of discouragement on God’s face and it touched him deeply. He didn’t fear God. Nor God’s wrath. Rather, he always meant to please, whatever job he took on.

And he resolved to do better with the second sin, assuring God and Santa that he would return to the first spot at a future time.

God nodded and watched Hephaestus go.

* * *

The smirk that crossed Trump’s face brought God to a boil. “Listen here, human, you wipe that shit off your face this instant, or you’ll live to regret it.”

Trump started to say something. But God took him out of magic time, and he froze in midsentence.

God said, “Give me some alone time.”

“Certainly, sir,” said Santa, averting his eyes and allowing the deity a few moments to brood.

Why did I ever create this wretched race? thought God.

They held such promise, and every once in a while they hold promise still. But so much pain and suffering continue to plague them. Just when they seem to be coming out of the dark ages, back they plunge into them. And how they’ve treated the planet they live on is a high sin of the worst kind.

Why am I wasting my time on this fruitless endeavor? Why don’t I just let this stupid-ass son-of-a-bitch motherfucker take on the amount of power that can hasten the end of his nation and the world? Would that be too cruel a thing to do? And what do I owe this experimental race of beings anyway? In the end, how much can I offer them to help them swiftly dig their way out of this deep dark hole?

God lifted his head and looked directly at Santa. “Well,” he said, “shall we proceed?”

Santa beamed a warm smile that lit up the room and said, “Yes, I believe we shall.”

Chapter Five

Second Attempt:
War and Peace

God the Father was miffed.

It had been a long time since he’d tried to change any mortal, at least directly. Hephaestus had done his best, but even that skilled workman had failed.

Now Hephaestus reappeared, and in no time his compact workbench was set up and God noticed the tool belt with dozens of tools, large and small, hanging from it.

God was having a hard time letting go of his wrath and disappointment.

All right, all right, he thought. Let’s shift to the second area of misbehavior in this man. The whole issue of violence and peace, the idea that one can only feel like a winner if others lose and lose badly.

Such folly!

God brought Trump back into magic time.

“Let’s let that one go for a while. We’re going to take up the whole issue of how much violence you have inside you. How little room you have for peace and how little room for respect, mutual or otherwise. The way you look at life as a win-lose situation, instead of the win-win situation it actually is.”

“I’m the most peaceful man in the world,” said Trump. “I know I talk whole heaps about winners and what losers people are. But you know me. That’s just talk. I’m really a very friendly guy. Very supportive of others and what they try to do with their lives. Anyone who says otherwise is a bald-ass, baboon-kissing motherfucker. And that’s all there is to it.”

“Blather, blather, and more blather. You seem to have this God complex. Nobody better in the world than you, and you sit on top of the world just like Jimmy Cagney.”

God observed with new appreciation the way Hephaestus worked silently within and without the man seated behind the desk. The tools leaped into his hands and dove down inside his belt as new tools appearing in his fists. And into the body of Trump he delved, working away with due diligence in doing all he could to fix that part of Trump which must insist on winning at all costs.

How absurd, God thought.

What after all was winning? Life wasn’t a contest, not the truly magnificent parts of it anyway. It was an exercise in creative competition in which you gave your all to your team, but always knew that you were part of the larger team of everyone who participated in the sport.

“Do you feel any different? With Hephaestus working on you, I mean? Can you feel the least difference in your body, in your mind?”

Trump closed his eyes and focused his attention on the question. “Yes, I think if I concentrate really really hard, I can feel this fellow making adjustments in me, not an attack, but a sort of healing gesture. It feels really good.”

Santa chimed in. “How lovely it is to hear you say that. He’s a skilled worker. Tops. I have every confidence you’ll be astonished how wonderful you feel, once his work is done.”

The smith looked up in mild sneer. “Hey, Mister Suit of Red and Boot of Black, I appreciate the compliment. But it would help me immensely if you let me get on with my work. Don’t mind, I prefer to fade into the background.”

“Sorry, Hephaestus.”

“If you two are finished, I have a stubborn wretch of a man to convince. And I’m not at all sure he’s being convinced or is simply trying to convince us he’s being convinced.

“Turning to you, sir, what’s your feeling about this issue, this peace against violence thing? I’m talking not simply about violence in the physical sense but in the sense of violent words, violent thoughts, the dark feelings of revenge and payback that always seem to obsess you.”

* * *

Santa listened intently to Trump’s response.

It seemed to come genuinely from the depths of his soul. And it showed a side of him Santa hadn’t seen before. Perhaps, he thought, the changes that Hephaestus was driving toward were even now having their effect.

Trump concluded, “And may I say, sir, how very grateful I am to all of you for showing me the error of my ways.”

“Well, I want to thank you,” said Santa. “You’re really trying to change, to cooperate with us. I can feel it in you. Given my past observations, it’s a side of you I’ve never seen before. So I’ll just say, keep up the good work, Donald, and we may be out of your hair in no time.”

Trump laughed. “You are one strange creature, Santa. You strike me as a very weak individual, always taking the positive side in every argument. You would melt like a hot, oozy marshmallow in a contest of any kind. Yet there’s something about you, something I can’t put my wee little finger on, that feels very strong, extremely wild, almost savage. But how I’m able to read that, behind those twinkling eyes and that soft white beard, is truly beyond me.”

“I have a past,” replied Santa. “One not worth getting into right now. With luck, you’ll finally move to my nice list. And maybe I’ll allow you to be awake when I visit you one Christmas Eve and we can talk about all of this. Because, as far as I can see, you and I have a heck of a lot in common.”

“That’s hard to believe. Extremely hard. You seem to be lying to me. But lies aren’t in your nature, are they, Santa?”

Saint Nicholas opened his mouth to speak, but stopped and smiled an enigmatic smile.

He was tempted to think that this Trump fellow was an exception, but as he looked around the world at all human beings, it became clear that his efforts to rejigger the underlying structure of the psyche had failed. This, despite the billions of unique and lovely supportive fucks he and Aphrodite had enjoyed and the million and a half they continued to enjoy once a week, shoring up the psyches of newborns.

* * *

Trump was beginning to resent the attempts to change him, particularly as they were being shown up, these three, as dolts and incompetents. He was going along with them—or pretending to—but he had doubts about them, about their strength, and about their ability to triumph over him.

He was beginning to grow impatient. He wanted to get on with being the toppiest of top dogs.

Besides, he saw nothing wrong with his healthy addiction to violence in thought, word, and deed. He loved to sweep up into a towering rage, watch the cowards quivering before him lose control of their bowels. It showed a special strength in him and in all men certain of their power in the political realm.

“I sure wish,” said Trump, “this limping fool would hurry up and finish his job. Seems like a lazy slacker. If this stupid fuck is the one maintaining the human psyche, no wonder the human race is so immensely fucked up. The blame falls squarely on this cripple’s shoulders.”

Hephaestus gave the slightest of sighs, but he did not falter in continuing his task. Nor did he reveal in any way how well or ill things were going. For all anyone else knew, they were going swimmingly.

Trump continued to goad him. “Bum legs. Bristly beard. Smells kinda like the stall of a swaybacked nag. He’s the best you’ve got, in terms of workmen? Makes me wonder about your capabilities, God the So-Called Motherfucking Father. How much more time are you planning to waste here?”

God said, “The whole winner-loser shtick goes way deep inside you, doesn’t it? If we had the time, and we cared to look into your past—by which I mean your deep past—I have no doubt we’d find out why this is such an obsession with you.

“But we don’t have the time.

“The time we have we are devoting to talking you into fixing yourself, and encouraging that fix by allowing Hephaestus to work his magic.

“That’s all.”

* * *

Son-of-a-bitch motherfucker.

He’ll not sway me from this fix, as unworthy as he is of my repair work.

It defiles my fingers to touch this train wreck of a psyche.

How can I turn this fucking thing from violence to harmony and peace? It’s shot through with nothing but violence.

I’ve worked with these mechanisms for thousands of years.

Could handle them in my sleep. Once did.

But this one?

By Zeus, I need a keener pair of eyes, a razor-sharp mind, the killer reflexes of a god far younger than I.

Tricky little fuck, this one.

One day, given enough time—time, ha!—I’ll trace every step of the way, see how it got here from the way it started out.

All right, all right. Don’t show failure. Brings it on quicker if you do. Exude confidence, though false.

I want my wife. She’d understand.

Goddamn rotten fumble fingers. Dexterous, but not enough. Not for this deal.

Jeepers, such a face on the Almighty.

He knows.

No need to pull any wool.

Not at this point.

Goddamn it all to motherfucking hell.

* * *

God’s mood darkened.

He knew well how to read the body language of his workman. And that language was telling him that this second fix was failing almost as sure as the first fix had.

This was going to be two against the good guys and none in their favor.

Now he cared not a fuck, flying or groveling, for whether he won this round or lost it.

But if they kept on having failures, they weren’t going to succeed in changing Trump one bit.

And if they weren’t going to succeed at that, they might as well vacate the premises, head on home to heaven, and let the disastrous chips clutched in this bozo’s tiny fists fall where they may.

Glancing at Saint Nicholas, he saw that the jolly old elf could read him at a glance. And he knew that Santa was swiftly gathering just how desperate the situation was.

Chapter Six

Third Attempt:
Uniting and Dividing

With desperate resolve, God the Father launched immediately into an attempt to fix the third area of disastrously psychotic material in Trump’s psyche, that being his failure to embrace diversity and his zeal to condemn anyone not white, male, straight, or of the approved brand of religion.

With the teensiest flick of his right index finger, he signaled Hephaestus to attack the third area.

And so Hephaestus had done.

God saw the surprise in Trump’s eyes. “Hey, now. Old Smelly here has shifted over to a new part of me, hasn’t he? And it’s feeling bad, real bad. Quite uncomfortable. The pain’s rising.”

God was tempted to tell him to go fuck himself, that he deserved all the pain he was feeling. Instead, he gestured to introduce a mild anesthesia about the man’s embedded psyche. “This might help ease it.”

“Ah, that’s better.”

“We’ve switched to that area of your crummy little existence wherein you fear differences among people and fail to embrace the diversity, the extremely wide diversity, I’ve built into the human race and which I command you—not to mention everyone else in the whole fucking wide world—to embrace with a love that knows no bounds.”

“I’m not sure what failing you’re talking about, oh humongous daddy-man in the sky.”

“You’ve failed, for one thing, to disavow the Ku Klux Klan and various neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups.”

“That’s not true.”

‘You’ve proven yourself a racist against Mexican-Americans with your comments about the federal judge presiding over a class-action suit against your so-called University.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You’ve said that laziness is a well-nigh universal trait in black people.”

“Never said any such thing.”

“You’ve called Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists.”

“Sheer exaggeration of a really big sort. And quotation out of context.”

“And you’ve fed the ridiculous notion that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president.”

At this, Trump lost it.

“Oh, fuck all those fucking people who stray from the white path, the male path, that old time religion path, and the path of macho men pursuing hot babes and grabbing them by their you-know-what’s.”

But as he ranted, a curious thing happened. His voice grew weaker. The stark hatred began to drain out of his words. Indeed, his final words drifted off into a half-sentence.

God was momentarily stunned. This felt like an instant of success. The feeling was genuine. And yet, God the Father clung to his suspicions. This man was a skillful enough actor to hoodwink the almighty, to pull the wool over even his divine eyes.

But deception of that sort could only go so far.

Was this freakish man simply being willful?

Was their quick success, however fleeting it might be, doomed to fail immediately?

And would it prove to be a tease on this con man’s part?

* * *

Great joy rose up in Santa’s breast.

There was no mistaking it. They’d just witnessed a change in Donald, one that felt entirely genuine with no hint of deception at all.

And while they had failed in their first two efforts, succeeding in this one—this place where Trump was wholly divisive and hitherto uninterested in unifying groups of people—felt essential to his reformation.

“Your heart,” said Santa, “is definitely in the right place. Bravo, Donald. Why, embracing diversity in the world’s peoples is what my elves and I are all about. I sense the children in each house. I sense their parents. I even sense their dogs and cats. And I revel in the amazing differences and how beautiful every last one of them is.

“Do you feel that now, Donald?”

“I do, dear Santa Claus. You three have shown me the error of my ways. And I welcome all the healing changes this crude-mouthed cripple’s making inside me.”

“Yes, Hephaestus is a delight to work with. His hands can work miracles. And I have no doubt that the miracle he’s currently working on is going to—“

But suddenly, Santa began to have doubts.

* * *

As Trump sat there, listening to the jolly old elf, he felt so far superior to him as almost to betray himself with a nasty laugh.

He regarded this Santa Claus freak as a weakling, more like Fred Rogers in that wimpy television show.

Fred and his goddamn girly sweaters.

An insufferable ass.

And this God pretender? Seemed more like Mister Bluster on the Howdy Doody show.

How he would love to cut the strings of this pinch-faced god marionette and watch him collapse. Hey, thought Trump, maybe I could take his job once I’ve polished off this one. Take on immortality while I’m at it.

Then he realized that the mask he had put on for these two bozos had slipped just far enough to bring sudden doubt into Saint Nick’s face.

He eased back into deception, hoping the moment had sped by quickly enough to be forgotten.

* * *

Although he showed it not a bit, the frustration inside Hephaestus now towered. It threatened to cause him to hurl his tools aside in rage and give up the attempt to fix this walking disaster.

Hephaestus regarded the resistance Trump put up as an affront to his expertise. He’d cobbled together special equipment just for this challenge. Now, that equipment had shown itself wanting.

“God? You want my advice?” he said. “This man’s been blowing smoke up our almighty asses. Oh sure, there was an instant, of extremely teensy duration, when I felt the change take hold inside him, when I knew we nearly had him. Then it vanished. He is one stubborn mule of a motherfucker.”

“Your breath stinks.”

“You know, friend, I don’t care one wee bit of a fuck whether my breath stinks. Know why? Because your smeller stinks a bazillion times as much as my breath does.

“‘Sides which, you’re a fucking liar. And fucking liars lie all the time. In my thousands of years of existence, I’ve never had Complaint One about the sweetness of my breath. So shut your pie-hole, why don’t you? Just shut your motherfucking pie-hole.”

“That’s enough, Hephaestus.”

God put the best face on things.

“We’re playing at the top of our game. That’s all we can do. We came close to succeeding with this fix. Which gives me hope—though it’s an extremely slim hope, nonexistent almost—that we may be able to fix this bastard yet.”

Hephaestus shook his head. “I’m telling ya. He’s playing us. This delusional little fuck is playing us.”

* * *

Inside God the Father, there swirled dark and ever darker clouds of doubt, despair, and uncertainty.

They’d caught success briefly by the tail. Then it had slipped through their fingers.

Three down. Still no success.

These bastardly human being-and-nothingnesses.

What had been the point of creating them, setting the whole ball of wax spinning?

Some easily swayed subset of voters had put this con man, this incompetent moron in a position he should never have been put in. And he was about to make a series of snap decisions from his belligerent gut, and from the calculatedly inhumane notions of the warped men surrounding him, the ones he had chosen or been convinced to choose.

God suddenly longed for the endless clouds about his throne, the billows, the wisps—clouds that looked like cotton balls, and the ones gravid with rain. Even those storm clouds thrilled him. They, after all, made no special demands on his time or energy.

But these human sons of bitches? Sheesh!

Now he understood why Santa and Hephaestus, why the Easter Bunny and Aphrodite, why Santa’s favorite elves and the golden automatons that aided Hephaestus in his work—why all of them had tried to fix the disaster of his, God’s, original design for the under-psyche.

Damned if he would admit it to anyone.

But he had failed in his attempts to create a reasonable human being.

It was one thing to say, as Milton did, that they were sufficient to have stood, but free to fall. It was another thing to make it almost impossible to resist falling in so many areas of their existence. If one was insufficient to stand in so many tempting areas of disconnection, then they were hardly sufficient to have stood at all.

But that was a question for another day.

Now it was time to move on to the fourth area of this warped man’s landmine of a psyche.

And oh my God what a fourth area it was!

Chapter Seven

Fourth Attempt:
The Nurturing Father

Hey there, gentle reader.

And a hello to my less than gentle readers as well, those more likely to be found tearing bullishly through china shops.

Your narrator here, popping in for a bit.

We’ve arrived at fix number four and it’s a favorite of mine. It’s what we might call the nurturing parent versus the my-way-or-the-highway parent.

The daddy parent in particular.

The authoritarian daddy parent.

I bet you can guess which one Donald epitomizes.

This sad, lonely man likes to force, to bully, to use the lure of money to bend people to his will and, if they refuse to bend to that lure, threats of various kinds to break them.

Take for example—

God chimed in, “Excuse me, mortal man full of talk and interruption. You’re intruding on my space, my place of priority, at the start of these seven sin-addressing chapters. And that intrusion shall stop right here.”

“Beg pardon,” said the narrator. “I’ll take this opportunity to withdraw, since I know you’ve got plenty on your mind.”

“You’re still here.”

“I have far more to say about my role, as opposed to yours. But that will wait.”

“Still you haven’t left. You’re trying the patience of your creator.”

“Hmm, I was about to say the same to you. But we’ll leave that be.”

Before God the Father could reply, the narrator vanished.

What an upstart bastard, thought God. Another instant and I might have annihilated him.

* * *

God’s frustration was beginning to tower, to turn toward divine despair.

Three failures. Why should the fourth try be any different? And how were they to eventually double back to the others and turn them into successes?

Santa said, “I think we have a real chance with the next one. We almost had him last time.”

God raised a hand. “Hold on.” He looked over at Hephaestus. Could it be? For the first time in forever, a sheen of sweat glistened on his brow.

“You okay?”

Hephaestus looked up. “Yes, sir,” he said in a tone that was far from convincing.

“Might you need—?”

“Better tools? Tools with more precision? Maybe. If you’ll allow me to—“

“Go.”

Hephaestus winked out, and in an eye-blink he returned with a second tool belt, this time packed with a host of smaller tools—probes, picks, needle-nosed tweezers, and many it would need a David Cronenberg to describe—very much like a dental hygienist’s tray of goodies.

“Ready.”

God turned his attention back to the fellow in the red tie. “Admit it . . . “

Trump said, “I admit nothing.”

“You have no idea what it is to be a leader who nurtures, rather than one who overpowers, bullies, intimidates, and crushes.”

Trump denied it.

But God pressed on, attacking his big-daddy idea of being a parent and a leader. His speech was long-winded, his peroration compelling, or so he thought.

Came the misfit mortal’s reply: “I like being authoritarian. I’m good at it. It suits me. Followers love that sort of shit. My followers anyway.”

So it went.

But something changed.

Decisively.

And Hephaestus’ brow, God noted, was once more smooth and reassuringly bone-dry.

* * *

Santa, who had hitherto held back, now felt a surge of hope.

For the first time, Donald was listening and Santa was sure it wasn’t an act.

He had stopped defending himself, stopped piling lie on top of lie. It was thrilling.

“Oh, Donald,” said Santa when a lull presented itself, “you’re doing so well. You’re really getting this, aren’t you? That makes me ecstatic.”

“Yes, I am.”

There was a softness in those eyes that Santa had never seen, an intelligence and a thoughtfulness this grown-up boy-child had never displayed even in his earliest years. Could the brute, the bully, the ruffian, the blowhard, the thug in him truly soften into something far more worthy of being called human?

And God resumed his dialogue with Donald, and dare I say it, this dialogue was more nurturing than bullying on both sides.

Progress!

Santa couldn’t wait to tell Anya, Rachel, Wendy, Chuff, and all of his elfin helpers, even grumpy old Gregor, what he now bore witness to.

* * *

Trump sat dazed and grateful.

At least his best guess was that this odd feeling was gratitude, something he’d never felt for nearly his entire life.

But how could he be feeling gratitude? These barging-in and blustering immortals—God the worst of the lot—were trying to change, and radically so, the fundamental nature of his ego, his personality, his entire modus operandi.

God had launched into a fascinating, surprisingly gentle rant on the nature of nurturance, of family—and not simply immediate family but the family of all creatures on earth.

For the first time, Trump did not feel compelled to interrupt. No defensiveness.

How odd.

The only interruption came when God harped an eternity on how loving true nurturance was.

As he was going on about that, another immortal made his presence known.

“If I may, Father,” said this one, a bearded youth looking nothing like the paintings of him, “nurturing was my specialty in my visit to—“

God’s head whipped about.

“I’m losing my patience, you little twerp. Do not speak one word more. Stop sticking your meddling nose in where it’s not wanted. Last warning. Get lost and stay that way!”

Lost he got, and quickly.

God the Father refocused upon his former target.

“Where was I? Ah!”

And he resumed.

A hair-trigger fellow, this Father God, mused Trump.

Who does he remind me of?

* * *

Hephaestus was back on his game at last.

These diminutive new tools were wonder-working little babies.

And wonder, on the scale of divine miracles, was just what was needed.

At last the intricate mechanisms of the under-psyche were bending to his will and staying bent. He shored up one after another, adding extra support to keep them from sagging.

“Things going well?” asked Saint Nick in a tone of voice that already knew the answer.

“Damn straight they are. First time, we’ve got a shot at fixing this fucker permanently. Sorry, Mister Saint, sir. Must stay focused. No more words right now.”

“Most assuredly,” said Santa.

Hephaestus was fond to the max of this fellow, this elf, this red-suited, black-booted embodiment of joy and generosity. He knew, of course—pretty much everyone in heaven did—that Santa had once been Pan, King of the Satyrs, and quite the randy, goat-hoofed nymph-fucker in those days, grasping after tree nymphs and pinning them up against this or that tree in the forest.

A randy humper back then.

And he with his two wives and his million and a half weekly fucks with Aphrodite. Clearly, he had reconciled himself with his prior identity.

Good for him.

And it served Hephaestus’ wife well.

God knew, he himself was overtaxed and overworked in the psyche factory. No time for luxuriating in divine fornication. What cared he that she found her carnal pleasure with jolly old Saint Nick?

Good for her.

A difficulty deep in Trump’s upper-psyche drew all of his attention from such musings.

This was proud work.

And pride, joyful and justified, was what he felt as he toiled and tinkered away.

* * *

This is going well, thought God.

But we still have a long haul.

Three more fixes beyond this one, two of them most problematic indeed.

And the need to head back and scoop up the trio of failures. Should be a cinch, once he’s turned and deep into embracing their changes.

Careful. Not over-confident now.

This man’s as thorny, prickly, and sour as stale piss and spoiled vinegar. No telling when he might about-face on them.

Still, a relief.

God felt himself moving away—most gradually, to be sure—from the thought of annihilating the entire race of human beings.

Extreme measure, that.

If done, his peace would have been bought at a dear premium.

Just keep that option in reserve.

No telling when.

As he spoke, and as Trump replied, God looked at last upon the man with something less than loathing.

Chapter Eight

Fifth Attempt:
Fake Religion as Oppressor

“All right, unworthy one, now we head into the topic of you and religion. Fix number five.”

Trump laughed. “No need for fixing what don’t need it.”

“You think so? Well start thinking differently.”

“I gotta say,” said Trump with a smile, “until a short while ago, I believed in no supreme being. Truth to tell, I don’t think you’re all that supreme. Maybe you’re just pretending to be God.”

“Cut the crap. If you persist in believing that I’m not God, I have no compunction about performing a few miracles to straighten you out.”

“The devil you say.”

“Yes, yes, I understand. You’re an atheist. There’s no changing you. It’s an honorable stance.”

Trump looked surprised.

“Okay, listen. You arrived here in part because of your manifold lies. Many of them went to that vast body of so-called Christians and you pretended, with all the hypocrisy at your command, to a belief in monotheism of that sort. We all know you believe in nothing but yourself. We all know you think you and no one else is God.”

“Point taken. But how would you change me? And why would you change me?”

God looked over at Santa and shook his head in frustration, then back at Trump.

“I’ll not spend a lot of time on this subject. You’ve used the fires of bigotry against religions of all sorts to stir up your supporters. We’re going to make sure you stop doing that. The changes that Hephaestus is now making are designed to bring you back to the ideas of freedom from religion, freedom of religion, and the superb notion that no nation should have a state religion of any kind.”

God sensed, in Trump’s new resistance, that something else was going on inside him, that this fix wasn’t proceeding as smoothly as the last.

“Let’s try something a little different.

“I want you to focus on what’s happening inside you. The changes Hephaestus is now making are hardly trivial. But they ought to soften you in ways that will be beneficial to you and those you pretend to lead.”

* * *

Santa looked over at Donald.

Frustration lurked inside the jolly old elf. An odd unnamable thing was making its subtle way through Donald. This fix was not coming anywhere nearly as easily as with the last attempt.

But he wasn’t about to show his doubts.

Sometimes showing one’s doubts led to proof that they were valid.

“Keep up the good work, Donald,” said Santa. “This is an important one to embrace. You could be as saintly as Gandhi or Martin Luther King. You need to stand up to your followers who’ve gone off the deep end and bring their violent ways back under control. That won’t be easy, I know.”

As Santa watched Hephaestus work, he wondered if their failure to change human psyches the world over had been because the clone connection turned out to be a weak one.

He wasn’t going to bring it up right now, but he was starting to be quite sure that they would have to redo the massive number of psyche transformations, using not clones but the actual psyches.

For now, Santa kept hoping, observing, and putting the best face on what he was seeing.

* * *

Religion? thought Trump. My ace in the hole.

Whacked out fundies and evangelenos exalting me like Christ Junior? Bunch of fucking rubes. I played ’em to the hilt, grabbed ‘em by the goddamn cross.

Stupid fucks had already pulled the wool most of the way over their eyes.

Piece of cake to complete the job.

“I don’t get it,” said Trump. “You rail against monotheism. Yet you’re God. Aren’t you, you know, the one and only big cheese?”

“Hardly.”

Trump’s eyes widened. “You’re not the only God there is, beside which there is no other?”

“Don’t be stupid. I’m both the one and only God . . . and just one among many. My names are legion. I cannot be pinned down to one label. Santa, let’s show him who we really are behind these masks.”

Trump started to feel very uncertain.

He liked not at all that this burly workmen was manipulating something inside of him.

He liked not at all that a god he’d never believed in was now standing or floating before him.

And he felt peculiar indeed to be sitting in the presence of one who clearly looked like what Santa Claus is supposed to look like.

Then they started to transform.

And man oh man, did that unsettle Donald John Trump.

For from the white robed deity, there emerged a beefy, bearded god with fists full of thunderbolts and eyes that flashed pure rage. And this bearded fellow, large and looming, was just as intimidating as the Judeo-Christian God had been when he’d first shown up here.

At the same time, Santa Claus in his outward appearance was now fading and giving way to a naked, goatish creature with hooves and with hair matted thick on his thighs and legs.

From his head sprouted a pair of horns. And his ears took on the points of an animal’s ears. Out of the crux between his legs loomed a huge penis, at full erection, thick and huge.

This creature spoke through gravel. “This is what I once was, and what I remain still. It’s all inside me, active always.”

This spooked Trump. “What the hell’s going on? Who are you two? And what does any of this have to do with me?”

Zeus returned to God form.

“There are many paths to the truth. Not one. I am both the God of the monotheistic religions and the god of this particular polytheistic religion. And Santa is both the place where generosity meets connection, and the place where greed, grasping, and lust form a god whose sole concern is with the carnal enjoyment of tree nymphs.”

Trump reared back. “What a crock!”

He was going to go further, but inside him the work that that ugly crip was doing had started to change him. And this time, he allowed the change to happen. He embraced it.

Yet the demon seed of resistance began slyly to sprout inside him.

And that demon seed had more guile than any Trump had shown before. It felt strong inside him. And it felt as if everyone must be able to see it, to feel it, to take umbrage against it.

Yet no one showed any sign of recognition.

Trump now had a new level of deception at his command.

Abruptly he changed tack. He went along with what God was saying. And he led them all to believe that this fix—fix number five—was succeeding just as much as the previous one.

Boy, this was some goddamn fun, pulling the wool over the eyes of immortals.

If the rest of his presidency was going to be like this, he couldn’t wait to launch the holy fuck out of it, to smash the champagne bottle against its hull and head out to sea.

* * *

As Hephaestus worked inside the mortal man, his confidence remained high.

But along with that confidence came the thought that these changes were taking far more effort than they should.

Contrary to expectation, the new structures he had created and reinforced—many of them at least—were weakening, bending, and breaking.

But he held his tongue.

He wasn’t about to let God the Father know that the possibility of failure again lay before them.

For one thing, as he tackled a particular fix, he always had the others in mind. And he made certain tweaks toward fixing them as well.

He was starting to weary of this task.

Could failure be far behind?

* * *

And God saw that it was good.

They were going to succeed. They were going to prevent major catastrophes in this country and in the world itself.

“Tell you the truth, Trump, I didn’t think you’d go for this one. It’s an odd one. All this religion trash. All this wondering what’s behind it all and making up supernatural creatures to explain things.”

“That’s quite a statement,” said Trump, “for one whose entire existence depends on such beliefs.”

“I contain multitudes.”

“Ah, I see. You’re lacking the strength of a unitary center. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Careful. You’re in way over your head. And we have two more fixes to make, as well as three to backtrack and pick up.”

Trump raised his hands and let them fall. “You’re in charge, I guess. We’ll do things your way, at least for the moment.”

“Still trying to win, I see.”

“Trying. And succeeding.”

“We have no time for such banter,” said God. “Let’s press on.”

Chapter Nine

Sixth Attempt:
Reverence Toward Women

God floated over to Trump, closer than he’d ever been.

“Okay now, this one is critical for you. If you resist being fixed in this area, there’s no hope for you.”

“Now you’ve got me scared. I’m trembling. I have no idea what it might be. But you must really have me on the ropes with this one.”

“We’re going to talk about you and women.”

“Women?” Trump laughed. “I love women. They’re my favorite female sorts of things.”

God ignored the bait. “You have such a long history of nastiness toward women, troglodytic attitudes, sexual harassment, some of it toward women of a very young age.”

“All bullshit.”

“Well here’s just a small sample of the things you’ve said.”

And God repeated several misogynistic comments Trump had made over the years.

The one about treating them like shit.

The one about if dinner isn’t ready when he comes home, he goes through the roof.

The one about the measure of a woman being her young and beautiful piece of ass.

The one about calling a breast-feeding woman disgusting.

The one about telling a contestant it would be a pretty picture if she dropped to her knees.

The one about blood coming out of her—“

Trump chuckled. “All taken out of context. A load of fucking bullshit.”

“Now, Trump, you really must stop lying. To the public, yes. But most importantly to yourself. You have a major problem in this area. As we speak, Hephaestus is working on it. Do you feel any different?”

“With what the crip’s busting his balls over? Yeah, it feels a little funny in there, like he’s trying to feel me up or something. But what can you expect from a disabled loser who hasn’t had his dick sucked in like forever?”

God shook his head. “If you don’t yield to the work being done on you right now, you’re never going to get where you need to go.”

“Yield? That’s not in my nature. And I’m not about to start now. Had enough?”

“Focus. That’s all I ask of you. Just focus.”

* * *

Santa was keeping an intense eye on the psyche Hephaestus slaved over.

He had seen the workman handle hundreds of thousands of psyches. He knew when things were going well and ill. He knew the signs far better than God the Father knew them.

And it was clear to him—as he witnessed the work Hephaestus did and peered deeply into the psyche being expertly re-engineered and coaxed toward perfection—that things were not going well.

They were starting to wobble.

Still, Santa held off saying anything.

He wasn’t one hundred percent sure of his theory. And it wasn’t his to question the work of a master like Hephaestus.

Still he felt the need to praise the man behind the desk.

“Donald, you’re doing very well,” he said, going on in that vein for some time, recalling the many visits he had paid to Donald’s house at Christmas and the let’s-call-it-angelic way the little boy was sleeping when Santa peeked in upon him.

“Don’t you agree, God?” asked Santa. “Isn’t Donald doing exceptionally well?”

God huffed. “To all appearances. But sometimes appearances cloud one’s vision. I’m hoping this isn’t one of those times.”

God drifted over to Santa to confide. “You’re closer to Hephaestus’s work than I am. Is he being successful or not?”

“Difficult to say.” Santa whispered. “I have some slight doubt, but it’s overshadowed by the joy I feel in what appears to me to be the approach to a successful conclusion.”

“Always the diplomat. Don’t you ever tire of being, shall we say, upbeat and optimistic?”

Santa had a philosophical statement ready for that, but he chose wisely to withhold it.

* * *

Inside, Trump boiled in fury.

How dare these strange creatures try to alter his feelings about the weaker sex? He hadn’t come to his opinions lightly. Seventy years observing men and women, separately and together, in all manner of dress and undress, had fed those opinions.

He knew womankind, back to front and side to side. No doubting that.

But he was learning how to play this God-and-Santa game.

He would go along, build up their confidence, see if he could dupe these self-styled immortals.

It was already working. He could tell that.

Gullible dolts.

He wondered what they might be other than what they claimed to be. Were they aliens? Was he having a hallucination? Was there something in this room, in its history, that amplified delusional notions?

At an inflection point, his feelings began to shift in strange ways. No doubt due to whatever the tinkerer was tinkering with.

An expert manipulator, this workman.

Still smelled like the stall of a swaybacked nag.

And his gargantuan pride? Unacceptable, even in an immortal.

Hephaestus, exasperated, said, “Hold still! You’re wriggling like a minnow on a line. Causes perturbations in your psyche. Stop it right now!”

“I don’t take commands from fucking cripples, especially stinky ones with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.”

“You’re one thin-skinned dude, ain’t ya?”

Said Trump, “Thin as onion paper, they say.”

“Onion paper?” Hephaestus laughed. “Way too thick. Two or three microns of thinness is my guess. Better measure, that.”

Dude deserved to be punished.

Trump thought of putting him on his enemies list.

Then he wondered how they would ever find such a creature.

Then he forgot all about that, and got back into dark brooding and vague plans of vengeance.

* * *

Despite Santa’s doubts, Hephaestus himself surprisingly enough was feeling quite positive about the outcome of their experiment.

To the structures that were failing, he had added splints and stents, miniature clamps, and a lot of spit and polish.

As for the divine feminine, he was finding surprisingly positive outcomes in those areas of the psyche related to the fecundity of all things.

True, there was the issue of Trump’s putdown of handicapped people.

Not that Hephaestus let any of that land.

But he could only handle one problem at a time.

And now wasn’t the time to attack Trump’s prejudice against the handicapped but that against women young, old, and older.

But his confidence in his workmanship grew as he worked on the man’s sixth sin.

Oh sure, he took several occasions to speak shit toward Trump, cutting repartee.

He knew how to thrust and dig at the blowhard’s precarious pride.

And thrust he did. He’d penetrate, twist the blade, wiggle it out slowly so as to maximize the pain and make the bleeding near impossible to stop.

Once he said, “You know, you lousy piece of shit, until this moment I’ve never had the displeasure to touch anyone so intimately and loathe them at the same time.

“Quite a feat.

“You should be proud.”

And Trump parried with a nasty reply.

Not that Hephaestus deigned to hear it.

It was the usual Trumpian crapola—brainless chatter, a tumble of jambalaya, a tossed word salad with no nutritional value whatever.

They had almost wrapped up. Easy peasy.

And Hephaestus was ready to move on to the seventh sin.

* * *

God’s mind was a vast field of delight.

This, he felt, was one solid success.

And upon this one, they would build the seventh and last success.

For love of women and love of planet were bound together in delirious intimacy. A solid love of one led naturally to a solid love of the other.

“Coming along nicely, Trump. I’m feeling very good about our progress.”

“Thank you, sir. It has been a pleasure and I expect will continue so, as you head to my next area of correction, then go back and pick up the places that failed.”

“Good. Good!”

Then to everyone in the room, Trump included, God Almighty said, “Here comes the big finale, folks. Let’s make this one count.”

Chapter Ten

Seventh Attempt:
Preserving the Planet

God felt immensely pleased with himself. That last attempt had been a major hurdle, one they had cleared easily with inches to spare.

“Now listen carefully, Donald Trump. You’ve been doing splendidly. I have no doubt that with this final area, you’ll reach the finish line easily. For once in your life, you’ll win a contest truly worth winning.”

“And what might that be?” It was hard to read Trump’s tone.

And God said, “It’s love of the earth.

“Of which, you may recall, I gave the stewardship to the human race.

“It’s about fighting the insanity of greedy men who care nothing about their grandchildren, who’ve deluded themselves into being sure that science is invalid, that their magical thinking is all that matters, and that somehow the earth will survive despite the damage they’re doing and are planning to do.

“Fracking, depleting the soil, slowing the move to renewable energy, casting absurd and unacceptable doubt on climate change, which is obviously caused by human action and inaction.

“I’ll spare you the data, because now that your psyche’s almost healed, you’re starting to see clearly what was always clear to sane people everywhere in the world.”

“Why, yes. I see that now. And I’ll change my ways. I’ll speak out on behalf of sane policies. My voice may not have much influence, but you can never tell until you try.”

God smiled broadly, nodding, and finding it in himself for the first time to love the man sitting before him. To love him in spite of the bluster, the warp, the insecurity, the bullying, and the desire to conquer by dividing.

But when God Almighty turned his attention to the work at hand, a horrendous new something came crashing in on him.

* * *

Santa Claus was so ecstatic that he felt an almost overwhelming desire to summon his reindeer and his sleigh, to sweep their way across vast landscapes of wonder, to gaze upon the earth and its blessings, and to shout from the rooftops, “Merry Christmas, everyone! Henceforth, each day will be Christmas in your hearts. And each night, you’ll bed down with the sure knowledge that new gifts shall make their magical appearance at daybreak.”

“Oh, my dear Donald,” said Santa, “you’ve become gloriously receptive, just as we hoped you would. Isn’t it grand? Isn’t it simply splendid?

“Right at this moment at the North Pole, I can feel your name readying itself to move from my naughty to my nice list. That’s how it happens, you know.

“True, you’re seventy. But the young at heart remain children forever, and you are on the cusp of embracing your childlike self.

“It will be such a delight to visit you in your home on Christmas Eve, and to leave you the greatest gift any immortal could leave you, the gift of knowing what love is, of receiving love, and of giving love from the openness and warmth of your heart.”

Santa gazed upon Donald with adoration.

Ah, but then . . . he peered far deeper.

And what he saw in those depths chilled Saint Nicholas to the bone.

* * *

Inside, Donald Trump felt majestically ready to drop the hammer on these, his enemies.

He would let fall the mask of repentance, put an end to this charade and to their smug little dances of triumph.

They will have failed.

They’ll be forced to acknowledge failure.

And he, Donald Trump, masterful man bar none, will have triumphed over Almighty God and Santa Claus, over all those boring-as-fuck angels with their weak-tea psalms to who the fuck knew what, even over Hephaestus, the odiferous, and his yonilicious bitch wife.

He could feel, of course, the intrusive tinkering going on inside him.

But deeper than that, he felt a joyous demon poised to spring forth, to destroy the painstaking work of the muscle man in leather.

He would order them out of the Oval Office, piss voluminously on the carpet, bring his family in, give them a few perfunctory pecks for the cameras, throw them the fuck out, and get this goddamned first day of his reign rolling.

“I have a little surprise for all of you,” he said.

* * *

Hephaestus could not believe his eyes.

He gaped at his golden handmaiden, her face as impassive as usual.

Then he stared in disbelief at his handiwork.

Everything that had been working, everything that had been shored up, every structure that had been reinforced by the most skillful, artistic means at his disposal—all of that had begun to crumble, to crawl toward chaos, to crush his spirit.

“What the holy fuck is going on?”

It wasn’t a question he thought anyone would answer. He certainly had no answer himself.

These fixes should have succeeded.

Yet, the failure came surging on, unstoppable, in defiance of all explanation. And it was grand and overwhelming.

The tools he held in his hands he let fall to the carpet. His shoulders slumped. He sat down heavily at his workbench.

There would be hell to pay.

Of that he had no doubt.

Question was, who was going to pay and in what horrendous coin?

* * *

Almighty God gaped in astonishment. He thought he must be losing his mind.

First came disbelief.

But swiftly came anger, wrath, sorrow, and a push toward immediate justice without mercy.

It had all been a pretense.

The overgrown child at the desk?

He was irreparably damaged and he must be laid low.

Hell, why not lay the entire race low?

Sure, there were a few small saints. But there were so many larger sinners of all sizes, and the worst ones always managed to find their way into positions of power.

Lust for money.

Lust for slaves.

Lust for pussy.

And these were the ones who had neglected and abused the better angels of their nature.

He raised his hand to smite their entire race. Then he stopped, slowly let that hand drop to his side, and folded himself inward to brood, to think, to ponder, before taking decisive action.

Chapter Eleven

Santa Struggles
to Maintain His Optimism

Santa had never seen God so upset.

Though he had brought himself to a new height, nearly to the ceiling, and really quite beyond it, he also seemed to have wrapped himself up, nursing his rage like an infant whose thirst refused to be quenched.

So Santa Claus turned away as well—pondering, wracking his brains, trying to think there must be some other way, some way to bring triumph out of trial.

A partial fix was out of the question.

All parts of this had to work together.

But what did he mean by that? They’d had the best heavenly minds working on this and they’d all foundered against the rock, the blunt thoughtless boulder of Trump’s stubborn will.

No trick would do it. No sleight-of-hand. It had to be something quite magnificent, the main attraction in the center ring at the greatest circus ever to raise its tent.

Santa looked over at Trump who was now frozen, outside of magic time. The moment he’d been frozen made him look strangely like the little boy Santa had seen on Christmas Eves long ago.

Being on Santa’s naughty list did not mean he never looked in upon boys and girls who’d earned that dishonor. He loved to visit even the naughty children, although he left no gifts to augment the ones their parents left. He sorrowed over them as they slept, praying for a change of heart.

Ninety percent of the time, his prayers went unanswered.

So many of them lived in surroundings choked with material goods, but impoverished in terms of human connection and the nourishment of human kindness.

What was that quote from Abraham Lincoln about better angels? Could it possibly be that Trump had none of those inside him? Might there be a way to revive and strengthen them?

One possible avenue.

How had they done this before? How had they responded when the Tooth Fairy sabotaged their efforts? With Aphrodite. Ah, yes, Aphrodite. Might she be brought into the picture?

He looked back at God.

Storms inside storms inside storms surrounded God Almighty.

There was no hope of breaking through all of that to even think about presenting new ideas. Not in his current state. It was impossible he’d even entertain such an idea.

And what idea did the jolly old elf think he was talking about? Vague notions, swimming about in desperation.

That’s all he had.

I’ll just go talk to her, he thought. No need to tell God where I’m going. He doesn’t even notice I’m here.

I’ll call Hephaestus over, take him along.

He signaled the workman, murmured his plans in his ear, and together they vanished.

Chapter Twelve

God in His Deepest
Funk Ever

This situation? Intolerable!

My heavenly creatures? My immortal beloveds? They and I mounted our best guns, threw ourselves into it with all our focus and power.

Still, it wasn’t enough.

No wonder Hephaestus looked so hangdog as he left. Oh yes, I noticed the two of them. Gabbling about something or other and going off like a pair of conspirators.

Donald Trump.

Such a lowlife, horsewhippable motherfucker. A bumbling idiot who thinks himself a fucking genius. Don’t need no advice from no one. Surrounds himself with anti-human know-nothings.

My mind feels like a pressure cooker with no escape valve.

I won’t endure it.

The nerve of that guy, fronting me with his smug belligerence, pretending virtue, leading us on.

Why don’t I just go in there myself, right into his fuck-ugly psyche, twist things about, warp him to my will, monsterize the motherfucker?

It can’t help but be an improvement.

Come the tears.

I ought to have been more careful creating human beings in the first place.

I thought I could just whip up this race, no special effort, No need for experts telling me how to do that.

Wait a minute.

Sounds just like him.

Too late now. That lethal mix of love for money and love for power has put its meat hooks into too many of them.

Heavy with sighs. Tears taking me over. What sort of god is that?

They had such potential, had they only put serious effort toward peace, harmony, and love. Just weren’t enough of them. Utopias. Some nations, far too few, were quite progressive. Others? Not at all.

This one? A brief flicker. Extinguished. Out upon a sigh and a sorrow.

What in the holy name of fuck had stuck a shiv into the heart of this nation?

Pride in exceptionalism undeserved.

Love of death.

Unbounded greed to plunder the earth.

Such potential.

Such sweet potential.

But those who could have taken that potential and run with it? Disorganized. Dithering. Scattered in will and act. Captivated by circuses.

Those angels, the ones brought out, the dead and the nearly dead? What a hellish life they had to have lived inside that man.

We’ve never had a ceremony in heaven the likes of which we are about to have, honoring those dead. Those sweet small angels. Powerhouses of beauty and love. Abandoned, neglected. No, worse than that. Put to ridicule and torture of an unimaginable kind.

Such a foul fiend of a man.

A man of no thought, no awareness, opening his yap in unruly crowds, spreading insidious poison throughout an entire society and thence unto the world.

Spreading terror through so many sorts of people, those not white, not straight, not Christian, not male.

The misled ones had brought this man to the pinnacle of power and set him free to magnify the perversities of his soul in ways as yet unperceived.

Now here we are, in the Oval Office, just minutes before his mayhem is launched.

And we are ineffective, we immortals.

We have failed.

This man, this representative of the entire human race—God help all of them—must be destroyed.

I have the power to do that.

Yet whenever I use such a power, it shows, for all to see, the failure of my efforts.

It is a last resort. A resort I wish never to take. Yet sometimes it’s the only resort.

God damn the souls of all those vile people who weaken toward prejudice, who strike because they’ve been struck, who hurt so much that they turn to hurting others worse than what they have endured.

And now, it’s my time to rise up, blanket out all human life on this planet, and go off for untold measures of time to brood over what I must do to atone for the destruction of these people, even the ones who have tried so hard to be kind, generous, and loving.

But all of them, without exception, have this beast inside them. This beast that now we see rising up to tear apart and destroy.

I feel all the destructive power of all the gods that have ever existed coming up inside me, boiling and raging, giving in to no mercy, ready to rend and destroy.

This absurd office, with its celebration of the past and its modern allegiance to failure, will be ground zero for the destruction that my body is about to release in all directions around the planet, meeting, crisscrossing, and returning here to cleanse this planet of an imperfect race.

Yes, I have been imperfect.

I have been faulty in my creation.

The fault is all mine.

The buck stops here.

I should have been a better god. I should have aspired to the perfection that I demand now of all my creations.

They were free.

Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. That’s how the poet put it.

But their sufficiency was weak, thanks to my errors in creating them in the first place. Rough hewn. Slapped together in haste.

The rage emerges, the rage comes up, the rage is all, the rage inside me, moving, moving, to come out, to come out and go forth!

Chapter Thirteen

A Desperate Gathering
of Saviors

When they arrived in heaven—or to be more precise, the psyche factory—Saint Nicholas and Hephaestus looked about at the long workbench and the hundreds of idle golden handmaidens floating or standing by, at the vast cathedral air choked with new psyches waiting to be processed and with the retiring psyches of the dead.

Hephaestus swore an acceptably muted oath.

Actually, no, it was unacceptable in any venue where prejudice held sway, but this was not such a venue.

His words were the strongest he had ever spoken.

“Look at all the work that’s backed up. Thousands of psyches waiting to be brought to the workbench, and who knows how long they’ll have to wait to be processed.”

Santa said, “My friend, we need to focus on the problem at hand. Not a moment to lose. And we’ve got to recruit a few helpers.”

He asked Hephaestus to bring his wife forward from her bower, while he himself summoned the Son of God.

Both showed up at the same time, curious to know why they’d been summoned.

Santa quickly explained the state of affairs and the urgency of their mission.

“Yes,” said the Son. “I’ve been watching and listening. I’ve meant to intrude, but sadly I’m on the outs with my father.”

Santa prudently withheld comment.

“Hephaestus and I have talked about the situation on the way here. We think it makes sense for me and Aphrodite—if you, Aphrodite, are willing—to make love within spitting distance of Trump.

“Don’t rush to yes, Aphrodite.

“This man is a disgusting pig.

“First time he laid eyes on him, God lost his lunch, which to my knowledge he’d never done before.

“So to begin with, until the fixes start to take root, we’ll have to endure the poisonous environment he brings with him.

“But once the worm turns, we should have smooth sailing.”

As they made plans, thousands of angels clustered about curiously, miniaturized for compactness.

The Son said, “Shall we ask for privacy?”

“I think,” said Santa, “we’re all okay with having an audience.”

He looked about to verify that.

Upon seeing the angels, who brought such loving energy to their little gathering, Santa came out with this idea: “Suppose several hundred of these angels came with us. Suppose they made music of the sort they’re making now. Soft, loving, and invigorating. Wouldn’t that be the spoonful of sugar that . . . well you know.”

Hephaestus stroked his chin. “It would certainly make my work easier. And I can imagine how having them sing to fill that office might contribute to the shoring up of that lying windbag’s psyche as we fix it.”

Then the Son came out with a brilliant idea all his own. “When mortals die, it’s common practice for a host of angels to escort the resident angels from the corpse. Some of them are dead, many malnourished and failing rapidly. In those cases, the better angels of the expired person’s nature have been ignored, neglected, disrespected, you name it. But they can be recovered and revived, even the dead ones.

“Now suppose we brought a host of angels with us. And suppose that, even with Trump alive, some of them were daring enough to enter him, rescue his better angels, bring them forth, and speed them to heaven to be revived. Suppose further that we rounded up a crew of angelic replacements, ready to head on into Trump upon command.

“I see you’re worried.

”But my plan is to wait until it’s obvious we are going to succeed, before asking them to enter such dangerous territory. And once there—“

Santa brightened. “Once there, they, with their fresh new strength, can help secure and reinforce, with even more certainty, the changes we’ve made to his psyche. That’s a wonderful idea.”

“I have one request,” said Hephaestus. “I’d like to bring along one of my golden handmaidens, that one over there, to feed me tools the instant I need them. She’s been like a second pair of hands for centuries.”

The one he had in mind was—as they all were—tall, leggy, naked, strong, assured and captivating to the max. This one had silver-streaked hair that clung to her scalp and ended in styled curls and twists.

All of his handmaidens were seasoned helpers. The one he had chosen Santa recognized as one of his closest helpers. Always the unblemished shine of gold, the easy oil in her walk, her buttocks swaying like streams of gold.

“I think we have a plan.” Santa beamed with all the joy and generosity in his heart.

Aphrodite spoke up, her voice like an alto flute exploring the limitless creativity of her beauty in all of its aspects. “Let us be quick. But before we go, I have a simple suggestion for my beloved husband, something quite easy for him to do, I’m sure.”

She took him aside, whispered to him, he nodded, and they came back to the group.

“Care to share?”

“Not yet, Santa. Soon.”

The jolly old elf gave a booming laugh, and down they sped earthward.

Chapter Fourteen

One Last Attempt to Fix
the Unfixable Fucker

And God rose up in the air, shedding his robe. His beard turned from snowy white to sand-and-gravel gray. His armor shown in all its ferocity, radiance, and splendor.

His arms were brawny, his fists huge. And in those fists he clutched a brace of thunderbolts.

It was clear that his first target would be Trump. Clear also that he would not stop with this man but would obliterate the entire human race.

But just as he towered up, bellowing his despair and his wrath, there began to materialize in the Oval Office a set of immortals which Zeus, blind with rage, at first had difficulty identifying.

But there they were.

God the Son, Hephaestus and one of his golden automatons, Aphrodite, Santa Claus, and tens of thousands of tiny little angels.

When the angels entered the Oval Office, their diminutive eyes were swiftly drawn to the man behind the desk.

And, to an angel, they puked.

But since angels eat light, it was as if legions of filaments shot forth in bold brilliance, all of them blinding white and full of love.

And like well-behaved light beams, the vomititious photons scattered hither and yon, only to vanish into the existing office air.

Resuming his white robes and beard, God the Father drifted back down to the carpet.

Assuming an air of calm, recovering his breath, God said, “All right everybody, what’s up with this?”

“It was Aphrodite’s idea,” said Santa. “We propose one last effort to fix this unruly man-child.”

God’s right arm instinctively raised. It grew back its brawn, thunderbolts beginning to appear in the fist. “It’s hopeless. He’s hopeless. Why waste any more effort on him and on this accursed race of beings?”

“Wait!” said Santa. “We have every reason to believe that this final effort will work. Remember how Aphrodite and I managed to salvage seven billion psyches the Tooth Fairy had perverted? One by one, we had each one brought to us in her bower, and there we made love that would address the wounded psyche before us uniquely, healing what needed healing inside it and doing away with the harm that that savage fairy, once the fiercest of ash tree nymphs, had visited upon it.”

“Oh, you mean those seven billion psyches which are now fucked up beyond measure?”

Hephaestus spoke up. “As I’ve worked on this sad little twerp’s psyche, I’ve come to see why there was such a disconnect between my psyche clones in heaven and the real psyches on earth. But if we fix this man’s psyche here right now, addressing simultaneously all seven major areas of his wayward behavior, I believe we can make this psyche and its goodness permanent.”

“You, Hephaestus, are a wondrous workmen. But you’ve been here through all of our attempts, you’ve worked directly on this wretched man’s psyche, and nothing has worked.

“What would make this different?”

God the Son spoke up. “Dear Father, who art in heaven most of the time but is now in this oval-shaped place, we propose three things.

“The first is that we search out the better angels of this man’s nature—fully expecting to find them in terrible shape, if they exist at all—and put in fresh replacements.

“The second is that, if Aphrodite and Santa Claus will be so kind as to make their exquisite love right on that desk within reach of that man, while Hephaestus works his magic and his golden helper feeds him the tools he needs, we have a reasonable expectation that their divine love will fix in place all the changes that have thus far failed to take.

“The third is that we’d like the angels we’ve brought to accompany the divine lovemaking with music that suits the occasion.”

“Well,” said God, “isn’t that a mouthful?

“You unrealistically optimistic crew seem to have this all worked out. And I, well, I suppose you can have . . . what shall it be . . . fifteen minutes to prove your point.

Or to prove mine.

“In any event, we shall have an answer soon enough.

“Redemption or annihilation.”

“Thank you, Father.”

“All right then. Have at it.” While God the Father looked half pleased, the other half of him looked full of doubt intermingled with despair.

Several of the immortals glanced about at each other as if to signal that now was the time to start.

Then Aphrodite spoke up. “One final idea, and a highly critical one, I think.” She summoned Santa, Hephaestus, and the Son to her and together they approached God Almighty, maker of heaven and gigantic hissy fits.

There they huddled, the five of them, in a divinely inspired whisper.

“Don’t you hurt me now,” said Trump. “You better not hurt me. You’ll regret it.”

The huddle broke.

* * *

You’ve just experienced a narrative technique we’ll call don’t-reveal-what-was-actually-said-until-a-later-chapter.

And now back to our story.

* * *

Summoning the angels, God pointed to three of them. “You, you, and you. I want you to go into this man and search for the better angels of his nature. Return and report on their condition.”

At once, the three angels obeyed, vanishing into Trump and in a moment reemerging.

Their once white faces were whiter than white.

To God the Father they reported, close against his ear.

God looked ashen. “They found several dozen of the better angels of his nature inside him. All but three died long ago. Those three are perilously ill.

“But I promise you this.

“If we can fix this man’s psyche and I feel sure the fix is permanent, I’ll ask for volunteers from this host of angels to bring out our dead and dying and to take the place of their fallen comrades.

“But I won’t waste one angel on a fool’s errand.”

“It’s a deal,” said Santa.

Then he took Aphrodite by the hand and they moved toward the desk.

Hephaestus and his golden handmaiden stood beside Trump, the tool belt expertly handled by the workman’s helper.

He beamed proudly at his wife as she and her elfin lover approached the desk.

Aphrodite at first was a wee bit hesitant, repulsed by the wretchedness of Trump’s psyche. But Santa squeezed strength into her palm and on they went.

As they neared the desk, its stained and polished surface uniformly softened, taking on the texture and resiliency of a mattress.

And Aphrodite’s bower, complete with its fluted bedposts, the vines that wrapped themselves up to the top of those bedposts, and diaphanous curtains of lace as clear as day on all sides, gradually came into view. The bower, scented with light wafts of jasmine, was redolent with herbs and roses.

Aphrodite, in a blue dress designed to damp down the power of her attraction on all creatures great and small, allowed that dress to fade away, revealing the fullness—and, man oh man, do I mean fullness—of her beauty and of the love of life that radiated from her.

Santa too, gradually lost his signature hat of red and white, his shiny black boots, and his bright red suit with the white puffball buttons. He was left with his red flannel underwear only, one buttoned flap behind, another in front. The latter unbuttoned itself, and out from that opening his magnificent member thrust, up and ready.

From the angels there issued a song that sounded much like the beauty of whale song, a collective gasp at Aphrodite’s loveliness, which none thought they would ever see.

One moment, she and Santa were standing by the desk. In the next, she rose effortlessly and lay back on the yielding wood.

Again, she whispered something to Santa and he comforted her. They had certainly seen all kinds of warped psyches during their seven billion fucks, but the mental illness had never been as concentrated as it was in this one.

Still, they had a well-founded faith in the healing power of their lovemaking.

Santa began by massaging Aphrodite, kneeling to one side of her on the desk. The sort of massage he did could only be called adorational. He did not concentrate on any particular part of her body. Nor did he focus on the parts of her that contained erectile tissue—the nipples, the clit, the earlobes.

His goal was not to excite her to climax, but to be with her fully in the present moment and to find all of his pleasure in giving her pleasure.

There were no goals, no indebtedness, no performance expectations.

Simply love and adoration.

At length, he focused his massage entirely on her pussy. His skilled hands adored her labia, both inner and outer, and he took his time before easing two fingers of his right hand inside her.

Aphrodite rode a rolling series of orgasms, none explosive, all rising and falling with the excitement he brought out in her.

* * *

God looked on from where he stood. His divine penis was full and erect, tenting his robe in front of him. He caught the drool before it fell from his lips. And he had the crazy notion—yet it wasn’t crazy at all—to turn into a bull or a swan.

Yes a bull.

Or a swan.

Or why not both.

It seemed the right thing to do.

That is, if he were to go over there and take her himself. But although he was the supreme ruler of the universe and more, he knew it wasn’t his right to usurp Santa’s envied place, nor to approach the divine feminine unbidden by the Goddess of Love.

But, oh my, did Aphrodite look inviting. Yet what was to be expected? It was her nature to pull in every creature with an ounce of life in it. But it wasn’t her duty to open the way to any damned motherfucking lover who craved her. Because in fact all of them—were they to see her—would crave her.

God felt as if he had a frog in his throat. He did his best to clear it and to look his divine best, in full control of all his faculties and emotions.

I can pull this off, he thought.

I can make it seem as if this is just another day at the office.

* * *

God the Son stood beside his father.

He too looked on and lusted after Aphrodite. That was to be expected. And while it might’ve carried a bit of surprise, he wasn’t upset or miffed by the fact that his membrum virile stood proud and tall and oozing pre-ejaculate. If anyone had been looking, they would have seen a small oval stain on his robe.

But no one was looking, not even me, not even my dear readers. Oh no, none of them.

“I’d say she’s doing a bang up job,” the Son confided to his father.

“I’ll say,” said God the Father, his voice a teensy bit harsh and guttural. Looking down along his boy’s robe, he asked, “Is that an erection?”

“It is. A proud erection. Couldn’t be prouder of it. Are you well pleased in me?”

“Oh, stuff it up your ass.”

“Your wish is my—”

“Oh, go to hell.”

“Already been. Not so hot.”

“So you have. Now shut your pie hole!”

* * *

Hephaestus was working like a madman, inspired, his fingers a blur as his assistant fed him, almost by instinct, the tool he needed next.

Within a few feet lay his wife, the paragon of beauty, infuser of divine and carnal love throughout the universe. And Santa Claus, once Pan, now had his face between her legs, licking at her clitoris with all the skill of the Satyr King.

She was quite the fucker, his wife. He loved the way she moved, the way she arched her back, the way she opened completely to her lover.

And what a lover he was!

Hephaestus felt the love they were generating surge into his skills. He was working with the surest touch he’d ever known. And yes, he too was erect, a big burly man’s big burly cock of a cock.

But that wasn’t something that would slow him down or get in the way of his work.

He would never allow that.

Things were changing inside the nasty little man behind the desk. And the fixes were holding. Not threatening in the least to collapse or unravel.

Hot damn! What fun this was. And how lovely it was to rescue the human race from its ill-deserved oblivion.

* * *

God the Father was lost in the splendor of the erotic connection between Santa and Aphrodite.

So it took quite a while for the hundreds of tiny angels to get his attention. They had seen that the effort to save this man was going so well that it was time for them to go in and rescue the dead and dying angels inside.

Now they were tugging on God’s robe, tiny little tugs, showing impeccable respect toward him, yet expressing angelic urgency as to the timing of their entrance into the man’s body.

When the angels politely demanded his attention, God’s erection swiftly wilted.

“Yes, go,” he said softly, gesturing in a fashion that urged them onward.

In they sped, and in a trice, they came out with less speed, each carrying the body of an angel, many of them beyond life, three of them barely breathing.

God knew, of course, that many angels dedicated themselves to standing by a dying human being until only a corpse remained. Typically, the final breath flushed out all the angels who’d found their home inside the dead man or woman.

This was the first time God had been by during an even more harrowing operation.

Entering a living man.

Finding the survivors and those who hadn’t survived.

Hoping that they, the rescuers, would not be similarly trapped.

And making their escape with their stricken angels held tight in their arms.

They gathered themselves to speed out of the Oval Office and head straight for heaven.

But God stopped them. “Let me see that one. Set her down upon my palm, gently.”

They at once obeyed.

Tears came into God’s eyes.

This one wasn’t one of the dead, but she was near death. With a light fingertip, he caressed her frail body. “You deserved better than this.”

The dying one, her eyes open, looked into God’s eyes, so pitiful and to be pitied. He felt the full force of her divine energy, still pulsing, still pulsating, but barely.

He felt her relief at being free of captivity, her imprisonment, and the neglect and scorn of he who had kept her confined and neglected, not once turning to her for strength to embrace human righteousness, never feeding her the respect, grace, and connectivity she deserved.

She was ready to embrace death, at peace already.

But he, goddammit, wasn’t ready to let her go.

He gave her over gently to her angelic escort, a precious vacancy now in his palm.

He softly closed his hand.

Never would he forget the look in that angel’s eyes.

As the angels streamed away, God gazed at his droop of a cock. That cock and his seed had been responsible for the initial creation of all things.

“Hmmm, into what womb did I shoot? Seems a divine conundrum. Oh, well. I work in mysterious ways, my wonders to perform.”

No time to ponder that now.

Not with the vision of a goddess in heat to savor, and such a redundantly lovely goddess at that.

None too gradually, his godly magnificence once more stood proud and tall, the finest, meatiest mast on the majestic ship of divine creation.

* * *

Saint Nick reveled in connecting erotically with the most amazing womanly creature ever created. They had had seven billion fucks together, no two of them identical, each unique, and each at the utmost pinnacle of desire, connection, and mutual erotic playfulness.

Things were always new with them.

He never tired of finding new ways to turn her on, and therefore new ways to turn himself on.

Whatever he was doing to her at the moment was the act he loved best.

Touching her divine vulva, stroking her clit while massaging her G-spot, and feeling lovingly and completely her swollen tissues—bathed in the most exquisite naturally-produced lubricant anywhere in the universe—gave him the joy of generosity as if every human being to whom he had given something at Christmas had returned his generosity a hundredfold.

Going down on her?

Total bliss, his soft, white beard drenched in the loveliness of her liquid outpourings.

The divine temple of her most sacred part, as he momentarily pulled away and gazed in wonder at it.

These filled him with joy.

* * *

Lying there naked, open, and aroused, Aphrodite took sweet pleasure in being completely receptive to her jolly old elf of a lover. Their union was something to behold.

Always new.

Always fresh.

Always full of ecstatic connection.

Soon, but with no hurry at all, Santa’s cock would ease its way inside her. Just as he was a master at touch, and at tasting her, so too was he a master at playing his cock inside her vagina. Slow, fast, in and out right at the soft lips of her introitus, then slowly, majestically as deep as possible, then holding there and deepening further.

Santa knew precisely how to read her body and how to respond in just the right way. He was like a tango dancer, totally skilled in the sensuous play of two bodies moving together.

She took just a moment, a sweet second, to bless her husband. The most divine of husbands, with not a bone of jealousy or possessiveness in his makeup.

Nor should he be jealous.

For, of any creature in the universe, she had an overabundance of love to give, to give, and to keep on giving, without stint.

Now Santa was moving over her, like sunlight over a placid sea, gazing into her eyes with those beautiful eyes, those generous eyes, those eyes full of mischief and lust and the divine love of life lived to the full.

* * *

Before the seated pretender, upon the Resolute desk transformed, there awaited a feast, a banquet of preparations for sex, for divine connection of a splendidly carnal sort.

When these two immortals first wiggled their way onto his desk, Trump found himself overwhelmed by the beauty of the Goddess of Love.

He wanted to grab her.

But something unTrumplike held him back.

To his surprise, without having taken Viagra, his cock was fully erect, nearly the length of his right thumb.

Greedily, he drank in her beauty. At first, he was focused only on her breasts, her nipples, her pussy, and every other place where he wanted to touch and taste her.

But gradually, as Hephaestus worked on him, he found himself simply admiring her beauty, without partitioning her body at all.

Her beauty made him want to cry.

And by God, the aromas lifting off her body—a mix of various sorts of flowers, the tropical fruitiness of mango and pineapple, and ocean saltiness—these thrilled him as much as any sniff of cocaine had.

More than that.

More than cocaine.

Much more.

And those beguiling aromas mingled with the ones Santa gave off—the richness of pine trees, the heady smell of loam, the scent of damp moss teeming with life.

Then came the sounds of her arousal and the approach of climax. She rolled through many of them, small ones, intense ones, her body arching and twisting without the least self-consciousness.

It was at the point where she almost drove over the top of one of these rolling orgasmic waves that Trump suddenly understood something.

Something novel and sweet.

He was gazing with actual, palpable love at the body of a woman. He was adoring—without lusting for—her body and in particular that place from which women bestow the gift of birth, renew and extend the race, regenerate life.

He was aware of his erection, yes.

But the peculiar thing was that he felt beautifully connected to the earth beneath the White House, beneath this room, in a way he had never felt connected to the earth since early boyhood.

And his entwined hatred of women and of having to be a steward of the earth, these two hatreds had abruptly vanished.

And not temporarily.

Trump knew, thanks to the work Hephaestus was doing, that his psyche was irrevocably changed.

At that moment of realization, Aphrodite suddenly arched in a most fetching way. Her breathing began rapidly to increase.

And up into the most astonishingly beautiful climax she rose, exploding into the most exquisite laugh Trump had ever heard.

Had this happened under normal circumstances, he would surely have exploded in an orgasm of his own.

But now, his erection was content to stand, tiny and tall, without having to move insistently on into sexual intercourse.

Man oh man, what a day this had been.

* * *

At the climax of Aphrodite and Santa—for Santa followed swiftly after her—the love they generated went everywhere.

It fixed every change in Trump’s psyche, as a fixative fixes a change.

It altered the room, bathing it in divine light.

It made God a better God, made the narrator a better narrator, and made every reader a better reader.

Such was the power of love done right, such the triumph of life over death.

Every creature and every square inch of surface in that room were bathed in an afterglow so powerful, so satisfying, that it felt as if it were a dream come to life.

Santa, to be sure, ejaculated in joy and generosity into the Goddess of Love.

And she felt both the warmth of that gush deep inside her and the deepest gratitude for having such a wonderful lover as her darling Saint Nick.

All the others in the room—male angels, female angels, God the Father, God the Son, Hephaestus—had what might be described as mystical climaxes, body-wide. No ejaculations, no squirting. Male erections naturally fading, and there were no blue balls left behind to tease or torment.

Some of them sighed, some thought they had sighed, and some did not sigh at all.

But every creature was deeply satisfied.

And Trump had been permanently healed in the most wonderful, life-saving, world-saving way.

Chapter Fifteen

God Almighty Brings
the Author Onstage

God raised his hands and clapped thrice, taking care not to overpower mortal ears.

“I have a brief announcement.

“Every one of us, in the last chapter, made such a success of things—and I include you, Donald Trump, in that praise—that the author has asked to speak directly to us.”

Hephaestus looked puzzled. “Author? What the fuck do you mean by author?”

“I mean the creator of our story. Now, now, Hephaestus. No need to get all worked up. Just go with the flow.”

At that point, God gestured and the forenamed author flickered into view, looking as devilishly handsome, debonair, and just plain wonderful and cutesy-pie as ever.

Dressed in that casual fashion for which he’s so famous, he beamed with joy. Unlike politicians, it was sweater casual, one might say. No tie. Never a tie. He hadn’t worn one of those fucking neck nooses in decades. And he wasn’t about to start now.

The author turned first to God Almighty and to Saint Nicholas, standing beside one another.

“My special thanks to you two.

“Thank you for giving me the occasion to write this novel. It’s taught me a modicum of compassion for this fucked-up soul. And also a resolve to resist to the max any action he tries to take.

“Later, I’ll be sure to advise all Americans to defy this bully, who clearly operates under the delusion that he has some sort of dictatorial power over his fellow citizens instead of being a servant of the people.”

He gazed upon each immortal in turn, with a tiny bit more of his attention—okay, okay, whole lots more—spent marveling at the Goddess of Love. Aphrodite had so blessed his life, both in terms of his birth family and of the many beautiful souls that had managed to make of the lumber of his life not a tavern but a temple. Thank you, Wayne King.

“Now, I know it hasn’t been easy, spending this much magic time with a man who, until the previous chapter, was a pretty disgusting bloke. But trust me, the effort you’ve put into saving humanity from the disgrace of this man’s governance is not to be minimized.

“It has been a gift.

”To tell you the truth, when I started writing this book, I had no idea if God and Santa, or indeed any immortal at all, would be able to pull this off. But somehow, you guys did it.

”You succeeded. Heroically.

“For that, I and all Americans will be forever in your debt.

“And as the news spreads, I dare say gratitude abounding will be coming your way from every corner of the globe.”

God said, “Without you, good sir, it would have been well nigh impossible.”

Santa gazed upon the author with fondness and irrepressible glee. “You’ve always been on my nice list, Bobby. I hope it’s all right to call you that. You were such a precocious little boy.”

“And you, Santa, made Christmas a very special time for me. Beyond measure, thank you!”

Then the author turned to Donald Trump.

“I’ll try to keep this brief.

“Don’t think I’m holding myself above you. I’m no saint. All of your urges I share. Well, okay, not all.

“I’ve never been accused of being a narcissist, a psychopath, a bigot, a racist, a homophobe, or a man with multiple severe personality disorders.

“Wasn’t it Charles Krauthammer, with an M.D. in psychiatry, who said you live in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside yourself has value only in so far as it sustains and inflates you?

“But now that you’ve undergone a life-changing psychological shift, perhaps you now see a way to put some of your values into the actable-upon category and others into the let-’em-keel-over-and-fucking-die category.”

Trump gave the author a most peculiar look.

“You’ve been gassing on like a son of a gun. Don’t you think you’ve said enough?”

“I’ve simply presented my take on you.”

“Which, by the way, has been completely wrong. Simplistic. And far too stereotyped.”

“That’s arguable. But let that go. I do have the author’s afterword coming up soon.”

“Ah, you get the final word?”

“Hey, it’s my novella.”

Trump began to speak, paused, then said, “I was going to say fuck you, but I’m a changed man. I’ll just say . . . go with God.”

The author glanced at the Almighty One, then back at Trump. “I’ll go. But I think God has other plans. Be well. Far more importantly, be good!”

“A preacher to the end.”

“I’ll save my fuck-you’s for the afterword. And trust me you’ve earned every one of them. Well not the you I’ve transformed through this narrative, but the real-life you? That one has.”

To them all, the author bowed and said, “Carry on being narrated!”

And with that, he vanished.

Chapter Sixteen

Immortal Reflections

Once the author had gone the way of all authors, God briefly dropped Trump out of magic time so he and the others could confer in private.

And God said unto his Son, “Not half bad. You saved our bacon.”

To which the Son said, “They don’t call me Savior for nothing. Am I still in the running for, you know, the second coming?”

“A little bit. But I still favor the jolly old elf over you.”

Santa volunteered, “Mightn’t we do it in tandem? We’d make a great tag team.”

“Don’t push!”

“Oh no, sir, I wouldn’t dream of it.”

God shrugged it off.

“Okay, I’m bringing the mortal back into magic time.”

He gave the tiniest of gestures, as tiny as Donald Trump’s . . . whatever.

“Well,” said Trump. “Thank God that scribbler dude’s gone.”

God cautioned, “We owe our existence to him.”

“Fucking blowhard, that’s how I’d characterize him. Goddamned wordsmith, a useless profession if there ever was one.”

God also shrugged that off.

“We’re about done here,” he said. “We’ll be on our way now. Santa and I will linger for a moment.”

That signaled the others to leave, and they began to do just that, the remaining angels first, then the Son and Aphrodite.

Hephaestus hung back. “Okay, Trump, you very strange fellow, I’ll leave these clones here for a bit, old one to the right, new one to the left. You’ve got the genuine new one inside you. This will give you a chance to contrast the two of them. They’ll fade away in . . . five non-magic-time minutes.

“Your memory of them? That’ll never fade.”

“Got you.”

“Oh and that huddle my wife called? She thought it wise—and, man oh man, we all agreed—to soften the impact of your guilt by turning up the feed little by little over a year. You’ll still see clearly the harm your words and deeds have done over the course of your life. But I’ve calibrated your psyche to dole out your ill-earned guilt in dribs and drabs.”

Trump looked taken aback. “You didn’t think I’d—”

“We did indeed.”

“Ah.” Trump paused, shifted. “Oh and speaking of your wife . . .”

“Uh huh,” said Hephaestus, knowing what would follow.

“Could I have her? Just once?”

“Whenever you genuinely love, if you really see and feel what you’re doing, you’re uniting in body and spirit with the Goddess of Love. Hone that vision of yours, hone your eyesight, and you’ll be fucking her forever, every second of every day.”

“I’d still like to fuck her in the carnal sense.”

“’Course you would. Who wouldn’t? Aphrodite’s supremely fuckable and supremely lovable. It’s her nature.” Then he shook his head. “But no dice, boy. Not the way you’re envisioning it. Be content with having seen a sight few mortals will ever see.”

“Really?”

Hephaestus bent close. “Hear what I just said. Let it sink deep. Understand? Now if you’ll pardon me, I have a mega-backlog of new and corpse-extracted psyches to attend to.”

With that, Hephaestus gave a wink, a nod, and was gone.

Santa caught God‘s signal.

“If you don’t mind, Donald, God and I have a few parting words of advice. First, we suggest you switch parties. The Democratic Party is quite a dreadful party all its own—imperfect, yes, but nothing like the fascistic clusterfuck that is the Republican Party. So switch parties, fire your current vice president and install Bernie Sanders in his place, then resign. There may be other things that make sense to do, but now that your psyche is healed, we’ll rely on your good sense—something you had none of before we came along—to carry you through to those wise decisions.

“That about cover it?”

The last was directed to God.

And the Almighty Father nodded his approval.

God said, “Not much more to add. Oh, there is one thing.”

He opened his right palm and pointed to it with his left index finger. At once, the dying angel’s suffering replayed upon his palm.

He raised it to Trump’s eyes so that the full impact landed where it belonged.

Trump sobered instantly, at a loss for words.

With tender care, God dispersed the image and closed his hand.

“Just remember, you’ve received a fresh set of better angels. Consult them frequently.”

“That’s already begun.”

“Then we’ll be on our way. Santa and I will wish you good luck and, um, godspeed.”

Trump said, “Excuse me, sir. Before you go. Last time you dropped me back into normal time, I read Chapter Two. You know, where your puke stopped short of hitting my face. This close?”

He held up his thumb and index finger, nearly touching.

“About the width of your prick in full erection, you mean?”

“Yes. That’s very funny. I wonder, Mister God sir, would you kindly try again and this time hit my face straight on, full impact?”

“Sure thing.” God stuck his right index finger—the one that comes within a Trump’s-prick-width of Adam’s left index finger in the iconic painting by that Michael Angel fellow—down his almighty throat, gagged, and blasted out a splendiferous spew of vast magnitude and range.

It caught Trump full in the face.

Magnificently radiant, that face.

“Thank you, sir.”

And, as God is my witness, the Almighty Father said unto him, “May the abundant blessings of my divine vomitus descend upon thee, Donald John Trump, now and forevermore.”

“Amen to that, sir.”

“We aim to please.”

“Your aim is true.”

“Trump, you crazy goofball. Never change.”

They all enjoyed a chuckle.

“Off to heaven then?”

God gave a wry smile. “There’s a certain gentleman named Pence we have to visit first.”

“Ah yes. Mikey Boy, my own beloved Dominionist theocrat, the spitting image of Robert Shaw in From Russia with Love.

“Bad choice on my part. Very bad.

“Give the bastard my regards. And tell him Donald sent you.”

To which Santa said, “I think we’ll be a little too busy to do that. He’s going to require nearly as much work as you did. No offense.”

“None taken. Fare thee well, both of you. It’s been a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Don’t become strangers. Send postcards. Or email.”

“Don’t hold your fucking breath,” said God. “We’ll have our hands full for the next while, fixing billions of psyches all over again.”

A divine smile radiated upon Santa’s face.

Lucky bastard, thought Trump.

And with that, Saint Nicholas and God the Father rose into the air and vanished.

Chapter Seventeen

Trump’s Road to
Damascus Moment

Trump felt a postpartum loss.

The Oval Office radiated the goodness of divine intervention. And Trump knew that that had not been a dream. But losing the presence of those exceptional immortals?

That couldn’t help but hurt.

How did he know it wasn’t a dream? It remained starkly vivid in memory, both in the memory of the mind and in the memory of the body.

Moreover, the two psyches, perfect spheres and perfect opposites, hovered in the air before him. He noticed the stark differences between them, one full of a love of death and destruction, the other a supreme example of the love of life, possibility, creativity, and an unbounded appreciation of the diversity of humankind.

How puny and pinched his earlier psyche had been.

How full of infinite possibility the other.

This new psyche he embraced to the full.

And true to the burly immortal’s word, they both began to fade. In ten seconds, they had vanished from sight.

He heard a rustling outside the door of the Oval Office. The natives were growing restive. All of the crazy sycophants he had installed were no doubt drooling at the thought of launching into this first manic day’s set of inhumane activities.

But first of course, would be his family, coming in for one final word before he ventured out into the political maelstrom that faced every new president.

He went over his plans quickly—to switch political parties, fire Mike Pence, bring Bernie on as his vice president, tell his proposed cabinet choices to take a hike, resign from the presidency, and hire himself the best fucking therapist on the planet.

Most important of all, he vowed, with a solemnity that had once been beyond him, to be penitent, to own up to his past failings, to make restitution to all he had harmed—what a vast chore that would be—and to do all he could to stifle, slam dunk, shit can, and utterly obliterate the Republican Party.

When his family walked into the Oval Office, they seemed like strangers to him and like the family he had always wished for.

In their faces he read the impact of his new self upon them, even as he looked at each of them for the first time as real, lovable, and beautifully flawed people. Not unlike everyone on the planet.

His relationship to them had changed dramatically.

He broke down in tears of joy and came out from behind the desk to embrace them. He could tell they had no idea how to handle the Donald Trump they now saw.

But he embraced them still, each one in turn, and looked them deep in the eyes with a love he’d never thought himself capable of.

His would be a brief but glorious presidency and he couldn’t wait to see the effect of his resignation on the nation he had come close to destroying.

The days ahead would be a delayed Christmas gift to all Americans and to every person on the planet.

There was a hasty knock on the door. A rat-faced scoundrel stuck his head in and blurted out bullshit that yesterday would have made sense to Trump but today read clearly as impure unadulterated hogwash.

“Ready, sir?”

Trump assumed his psychopathic face. “Ready.”

Rat-face beamed bile and hate.

Left.

He would send that fellow scurrying first of all. Plenty more would swiftly follow.

Grand and glorious days lay ahead.

And a history quite different from the one that had promised a day of ruin as a prelude to disaster on a planetary scale.

Hot damn. He had a new legacy.

And, man, did this one taste delicious.

A Plaintive Afterword

On the State of the Union

At last, we’ve arrived at the author’s afterword.

This little tale is an essay on political insanity—gone way the fuck over into dread promises of chaos proliferating—in the form of a comic fantasy novel.

It borrows ongoing characters from my three previous novels about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny.

But it’s a story unto itself.

It’s much shorter than the others, and it concerns a dreadful new period in our nation’s history. I refer, of course, to the election to the presidency of a petulant man-child who’s not merely incompetent but dangerous to the future not simply of the nation but of the world itself.

In my previous Santa novels, I reveal the true nature of the three fantastic immortals that enter our childhood homes at various times during the year. I toy with Greek mythology, and the first book, Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups, is a highly erotic book, a transgressive book, a book that casts new light upon these creatures.

Most decidedly not for children!

Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes sees Santa first saving one boy from impending suicide, then expunging homophobia entirely from the human race.

Santa Claus Saves the World shows us a Saint Nicholas at work in the heavenly psyche factory. With the help of Hephaestus, who handles all newborn and retiring human psyches, he reengineers our basic under-psyche to eliminate weaknesses in the original design.

At the end of that novel, in order to maintain the integrity of the new design, Santa Claus—once Pan, King of the Satyrs—takes on the highly desirable task of fucking Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, in the proximity of every human psyche, one at a time.

That comes to seven billion tumbles in the hay. Indeed, Santa and Aphrodite fuck over a million times every week to guarantee that each newborn’s psyche gets off to a proper start.

At that novel’s triumphant conclusion, everyone believes that this fix—despite the obstacles thrown at it along the way by a villainous Tooth Fairy and her helpers—is working just fine and that Santa has solved every human problem except death, though of course death may or may not be a problem at all.

Now we come to this slim volume, God and Santa Claus Trump Trump with its subtitle A Christmas Tale of Generosity, Love, and Redemption. Clearly, the fixes to the psyche from my third Santa novel have somehow failed. Otherwise, it would have been unthinkable for a fucked-up, whacked-out carnival barker like Donald Trump to win the presidency of what had always been one of the finest countries in the world.

So in a critical sense, this book is a continuation of the fantasy tale that threads through the initial three novels of my Santa Claus Chronicles.

On the other hand, I reserve the auctorial right to pretend that this novella never existed and to write a fourth full-sized novel that picks up where the third one ends. Just as I’d dearly love to pretend that the insanity of Trump’s indecent ascendancy to a seat of pretended power never existed.

The players in this odd little story are fantastical, immortal, imaginative creations.

Yet none is more fanciful, more an imaginative creation, than Donald Trump himself.

I have never met the man. I have never seen any of his television appearances. I know him only from last year’s bizarre campaign that began to unravel our culture. That, because of who this man-child is, gave deplorable men and women what they felt was permission to proudly display their worst traits—their bigotry, xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance—and the list, alas, goes on.

And now we have this abominable, abhorrent, aberrant anomaly, known as Trump, about to do all he can to destroy our freedoms and turn the sometime glory of our democratic republic into a dictatorship.

Let’s be clear about one thing. Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to this nation. As I finish writing this book, he is just weeks away from taking over from Barack Obama. In the month-plus since let-us-cringe-and-call it his election, Trump has already shown that he is incompetent, petulant, and given to dangerous threats against not only the press but the free speech of common citizens as well.

I would love to put the word “election” in very heavy quotes, even though, according to the custom of our nation’s history, the Electoral College decides who the president will be. That being said, as of this writing, Hillary Clinton has won the popular vote by close to two point nine million votes, a gap without precedent.

Even if she hadn’t done so, many of us are loath to call Trump the president of anything, let alone of our nation. And will refuse to do so. How he acted during the primaries, the way he spewed his petulance into his crowds, and the way in which so many of his followers have felt emboldened to assault, either in word or deed—it’s anybody’s guess how horrendous those deeds will become—people who look or are different from the vaunted white male.

Let me make it clear.

Unlike our bought-and-sold corporate media, we must not normalize this man’s behavior.

Call him Pretender Trump. Or call him Predator Trump. Or call him That Son of a Bitch Squatting in the People’s House.

Never president.

We must stand up to every instance of bigotry and hatred we witness in the public arena.

If we do that en masse, early enough in the steep tumble of the emboldened into fascist thuggery, we can put an early stop to it. Let them know we will not tolerate such behavior ever.

I’m not going to tell you how to react to incidents of this sort. People appear to have reacted in two ways. The first, and perhaps the safest, is to ignore the attacker, approach the person attacked, stand with them, talk to them, assure them you’re a friend, possibly even stand between them and the attacker. The second—more risky, but quite wonderful when done well—is to confront the attacker directly. I have read amazing accounts of this sort of response.

If that’s the tack you take, I urge the use of this phrase: “You are better than that.”

In any event, be cautious, be safe, and when you can, be bold and firm with those acting out in unacceptable ways.

The GOP’s Steady Drift into Fascism

Trump is the natural culmination of a trend that’s been going on in the Republican Party since the days of Ronald Reagan—a steady drip toward the horrors of fascism. Until now, this anti-American political party, once the proud party of Abraham Lincoln, has stopped short of dictatorial fascism, contenting itself with economic fascism only.

But now is a new day.

Sad to say, the Democratic Party, since at least the days of Bill Clinton, has drifted spinelessly and steadily rightward, trying to attract the same class of rich people and corporations. For far too long, it has ignored its true base in the working class and the middle class. If the Republican Party is the fascist party, I’ve taken to calling the Democratic Party fascist-lite.

Given that, and despite the appearance that Republicans at various times during the primary have acted appalled at Trump and his monstrous behavior, they in fact are the ones who have brought this inhuman freak before us as their choice of a presidential candidate, and they must accept the responsibility for having brought us to this pass.

If there’s any justice in the world, and if we can survive two years without the loss of our democratic republic, the Republican Party should be summarily voted out of existence in the elections two and four years from now.

But, alas, in some realms, especially the political, there seems to be no justice in the world. Or if there is some, it’s minuscule in amount.

The rest of this afterword is in the form of a series of pleas, beginning with . . .

A Plea to Donald Trump

Donald, you have heard and seen all of the nasty things people say about you. I suspect you wonder why they say all these nasty things. It strikes me, and I may be wrong about this, that you have no idea what the impact is of what you do and say, especially as your forum has grown larger.

Well let me inform you, Donald, that if you care at all about the United States of America, if you care about our form of government, the one that both of us grew up in, then I implore you to understand that you have begun the destruction of this form of governance, and you show no signs of letting up or allowing yourself to know that this is what you’ve been doing.

In a word, you embody disconnection.

And it’s my guess you are disconnected in every area of life. You couldn’t be the way you are otherwise.

But you are a minority president, no mandate of any kind and unpopular in the extreme.

And we’re all still here, more determined than ever to fight you every step of the way in the cause of the family of humanity, one diverse and honored family here and planet-wide.

We will unite around populist leaders, progressive populists like Bernie Sanders or FDR, who will help shape an America we can be proud of, looking out for all its citizens, speaking out resoundingly in its rejection of oligarchy and those who would deny the people their rights and freedoms.

Your run for the presidency began the serious disruption of this great country. You’re only on the way to the presidency because of 50,000 votes in three states. You’ll be a non-president, a loser, whom Hillary beaten by nearly 2.9 million popular votes.

But even if we could have kept the 270 electoral votes from you, we would still—on account of your encouragement of fear, hatred, and thuggery—have had plenty of confrontation and healing to do.

Would you do us a favor and stop at once what you’re doing, go away, get a shrink, and learn how best to undo the anti-American damage you have done? My plea to you is to seek help, psychiatric help, because you need it badly. Before you do that, I urge that you follow this novel’s suggestions in at least these matters.

First, that you switch your party affiliation.

Second that you fire Mike Pence and make Bernie Sanders your vice president.

Third, that you resign the presidency and retire into private life. If you show your face at all in the political realm, I implore you to do so in support of all of Bernie’s proposals.

Do I expect you to do any of these things?

Of course not.

But speaking them aloud puts them out there.

The other thing I implore you to do is to remove all the sycophants now surrounding you, instead bringing in sympathetic souls to advise you on your healing process in the years remaining to you.

My Plea to the Republican Party

As you have changed from the days of Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller, you’ve gradually moved into mass un-American insanity, and those who now constitute your persons in power will likely not understand what I’m asking for here, because it has been your policy, since Newt Gingrich suggested it, always to put up the most extreme right-wing candidate possible in every position.

Therefore, virtually all of you listen with skewed and damaged ears.

That’s a major part of our national tragedy.

But this is what I ask of you: If Trump does not give up the presidency, it’s up to you to refuse to rubberstamp this madman’s choices in cabinet posts. To become in fact the opposition party in Congress against a man who will surely become a tyrant and a dictator if you fail to do so.

One way you might go about this is to hire the equivalent of a clinical psychologist for your entire party. I have no idea who that might be, but I also have no hope that you’re actually going to do such a thing. So let’s leave finding that miracle worker to you, fantasizing that you’ve somehow turned far wiser than you currently are.

Now I don’t want to sound flippant, and this is indeed a fantasy novel, but these are very serious times and our way of government, our way of life, is under dire threat. Of course, it’s not just our nation that’s at risk. It’s the entire world population, and the world itself.

You cannot afford to ignore science, pretending that climate change isn’t real. And you cannot afford to withdraw from international bodies working, far less frantically than they should, at addressing the urgent problems of climate change, phasing out our dependence on fossil fuel, and controlling the thus far uncontrollable planetary population explosion.

Your party was once the party of Lincoln. How low you’ve fallen since then. I ask you to rise up, to keep rising up, until you’ve reached a plateau with some semblance of compassion and humanity about it.

My Plea to the Democratic Party

A plea to the Democratic establishment.

Go progressive.

Get back to supporting all Americans.

Refuse to be bought by the rich.

Give us as candidates no more corporatists.

Stress your genuine positives and call out the massive negatives of Trump and the GOP.

Grow a pair. Grow a spine.

Use as many bully pulpits as you can construct to speak truth, lay out the stark differences, and good-goddamn-represent us in this fight.

If I sound harsh, please understand that I don’t intend to shame you . . . although you have indeed acted shamefully and increasingly so during my long life.

I’ll just say to you:

You are better than this.

You can do better than this.

You can walk away from the corruption, the hypocrisy, and restore the integrity of this nation’s governance.

My Plea to All Americans of Good Heart

Those of you who understand how treacherous and powerless these times are will have a natural tendency to panic, to fear and to give in to fear, to focus on the negative, and indeed there are so many negatives about this man and his party.

I don’t ask you to push away that fear and panic. What I ask is that you focus on your values and the values of all of us. And that you live those values every day. If you present yourself as anti-Trump only, you’ll only reinforce his story.

Let me make my meaning clear. Trump harbors the illusion, and it’s a powerful one, that he’s in charge, that he’s the big daddy, that he knows best, that you are little peons who mean nothing at all. But in fact, the president is meant to serve all the people. To serve. To be a servant. Not to be a bully, not to be a dictator, not to be a tyrant.

That whole bullshit story is simply a story. It has no power other than the power his listeners give it. Learn to listen to that story and turn away from it, because that story isn’t true. Despite his wealth or lack of it, Trump is an ordinary citizen who has been perversely chosen to fill the role of president. But he is equal to all of us, to any one of us, and we should always approach him on a level playing field. Not from a place where we cower before him and fear that he is going to harm us in some way or that his followers, benighted souls, are going to harm us in some way.

Stand up to him in all of your righteousness, doing your best to put aside hatred, scorn, and contempt—no matter how much Trump deserves all of those things—and set forth your truth, our truth, making no compromise with bigotry, xenophobia, sexism, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, or any of the other divisive feelings Trump has evoked in his speech, in his actions, and on the campaign trail.

If enough of us stand up right now and for as long as this unworthy man has any power at all, we can triumph over him the way the German people surely wish they had triumphed over Hitler, and the Italian people must wish they had triumphed over Mussolini.

Fight this pretender’s every feint and jab at our culture. Keep him confined, quarantined, locked away for as long as he’s anywhere near the power to harm.

Make every city a sanctuary city.

Every town.

Every home.

Every person.

Words of wisdom from a wise woman:

"The pain we feel is the removal or our illusory comfort zone where we thought everything was sort of okay. But as everything is not okay, we need the curtains pulled back. Behold, the psychopathic, heartless gaze of the deadly machinery of predator oligarchic colonial capitalism. Behold its decaying, soulless, craven, narcissistic, violent, and ugly face. Its sheer lack of beauty, grace, sanctity, poetry, love, and wise counsel. This machinery is set to destroy everything for profit and power. Before we can take it on anew, we have to fully get the depth of its utter moral and spiritual bankruptcy. Its total lack of humanity. We have to feel, not just intellectualize. This is so we can really get those already sacrificed to its relentless agenda."

- Thanissara

If you clearly recognize the threats to our freedoms from emboldened fascists—and, God help us, from the government itself, right on up to the tantrum-prone toddler in the White House—let your voice be heard.

Let the voices of all of you be heard.

Not in hatred, not in anger, but in love.

Let Gandhi and Martin Luther King inspire you. Let Emma Goldman, Mother Jones, and Nelson Mandela be your guides.

Far too many Germans remained silent.

Do not remain silent.

Bring forth your best vision of the human family and speak it boldly, with confidence and love.

Support those attacked.

Love the bullies but despise their bullying.

Let them not prevail.

Tell them, “You are better than this. Be better than this.”

My Plea to Trump’s Worst Followers

My next plea is to those Americans who have allowed themselves to be emboldened by Trump’s persona and now give voice, openly and seemingly with pride, to various forms of hatred against those different from you.

You are better than this.

You are far better than this.

And I ask you to return to that better place.

Now I haven’t talked to any of you, so I don’t know how you feel about where you’ve been and where you are now. But I hope you will feel shame or at least guilt about what you are doing, what you are saying, to people who happen to be different in some way. Were you really bottling up what you now so horrendously proclaim? And if you were to put it back in its bottle, would it really be like a pressure cooker?

Let me presume that that is so. If so, I ask you not to see this as a pressure cooker situation. I ask that you notice your dark feelings, nod at them, accept them as part of yourself, have them sit in a corner and be quiet, then commit yourself, moment by moment, not to act upon them but simply to let them exist.

We are not squelching your expression. We ask that you squelch your expression. And we ask it in the name of decency and humanity. You are part of decent humanity. You are better than this, you are better than this bigotry, this hatred.

Finally, A Plea to All People Worldwide

Empathize with us as a nation.

Through various tricks and chicanery, through the peculiar mechanism that remains, up to this point, our nation’s way of electing presidents, through errors of commission and omission on the part of many people, we have arrived here.

But we are better than this.

And we know that.

With luck, we will deny this man the presidency either right away, within months, or God forbid within years.

But we will deny him.

We are virtuous in enough numbers that we can minimize his harm. But we are going to need your support, wherever you are in the world. Just as we will need the support of every American now living, especially those who wield power in the political realm.

And I speak of people in all parties and no parties when I speak of such people. They all need to stand up and say no to a man who is a bully, a narcissist, a starkly divisive force, someone who has never grown beyond the mental age of six.

They all need to stand up and say no to Trump.

I’m under no illusion that my novel is going to make any difference whatsoever, but I’m also aware that narrative art can sometimes do so. There are many examples in our history, and there are many examples, I’m sure, in the history of other parts of the world.

One such is Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. When Lincoln met her, he is reputed to have said, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."

Like other such anecdotes, that one may be apocryphal. But apocryphal stories crop up because they contain a grain of truth. I’m under no illusion that my book will be anything like Stowe’s.

But one of our strengths lies in our creativity and the artistic expression of our values. This is one such attempt. I hope you’ve found it to your liking, and I hope it will move you to action in the realm where you find your greatest strength.

We need the action and support of every American to minimize the damage—and major damage it may well be—that Trump and the Republican Party are poised to visit upon this nation and the world.

I ask you, in the strongest terms possible, for that action and support.

And I ask you to pledge that action and support every day during these trying times.

Thank you.

And One Last Plea to Donald Trump

Dear messed up Donald, please reread the sexy, profoundly transformative Goddess of Love Upon a Desk chapter and the Road to Damascus chapter.

Take them to heart. Then change in precisely the way my imagined Trump changes. Surrender to the redemptive power of fantasy.

That’s all I ask.

It’s such a tiny thing to ask.

It’s a strange wonder that you’ve arrived at such a pinnacle of political power. Wouldn’t you agree?

But why squander it by doing predictable things? We, alas, expect and dread that you’re gearing up to magnify your worst qualities.

I need not name them.

Suppose instead you defied the Republican jackals in Congress, blessed your pain and bade it sit quietly in the corner, resolved to heal and make genuinely great this country of unlimited potential, created a council of advisors who helped you map out a truly inspiring direction into the future?

If you truly want a revered place in the history books, a lasting legacy of love, that’s the way to secure it.

Abandon all notions of chest beating.

Of bludgeoning out so-called wins meant merely to stanch wounds that cannot be stanched.

Of soothing your thin, easily bruised skin with the stings, hurt, and revenge you’d like to visit upon those you perceive as enemies.

Be a unifier.

Give up the crutch of divisiveness. Throw it away and walk tall—I mean, really tall—for the first time in your life.

Pink-slip, wave bye-bye to, and say a lukewarmly fond farewell to the know-nothing goofballs you’ve surrounded yourself with, consigning them to a well-deserved obscurity.

Pull together instead an advisory board of wonder and goodness. Name them that: The Advisory Board of Wonder and Goodness.

Hold them to that agenda. No evasiveness, no hidden agendas, no bullshit.

And take to heart their considered advice.

That’s the kind of legacy that will make you a true winner in this peculiar game of life.

Here’s to the power of fantasy!

Robert Devereaux

Iowa City, Iowa

December 25, 2016

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Devereaux is best known for his off-the-wall novels, especially Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups, and for his short fiction, much of which may be found in Baby’s First Book of Seriously Fucked-Up Shit. His most recently published novels are Caliban and Oedipus Aroused: Homer’s Long-Lost Erotic Epic. You can find him on Facebook or at www.robertdevereaux.com.

Works by Robert Devereaux

SANTA STEPS OUT: A FAIRY TALE FOR GROWN-UPS

SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE HOMOPHOBES

SANTA CLAUS SAVES THE WORLD

CALIBAN

OEDIPUS AROUSED: HOMER'S LONG-LOST EROTIC EPIC

BABY’S FIRST BOOK OF SERIOUSLY FUCKED-UP SHIT

SLAUGHTERHOUSE HIGH

A FLIGHT OF STORKS AND ANGELS

DEADWEIGHT

WALKING WOUNDED

ZOMBIE MASHUP

Table of Contents

- Chapter Zero
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four
- Chapter Five
- Chapter Six
- Chapter Seven
- Chapter Eight
- Chapter Nine
- Chapter Ten
- Chapter Eleven
- Chapter Twelve
- Chapter Thirteen
- Chapter Fourteen
- Chapter Fifteen
- Chapter Sixteen
- Chapter Seventeen
- A Plaintive Afterword