SANTA'S LAST RIDE

           It was the night before Christmas.

           A rare meteorological event took place: Mist bubbled up from the depths of the oceans, and joined cold moisture from the rivers and swamps and lakes to create thick, swirling fog; heavy gray clouds enclosed the entire planet. Snow fell, rose in dervishes. Snow coated the Earth white from the south pole to the north. The Earth was like a bubble encased in an atmosphere of vapor and frost, so uniform as to be invisible to Doppler radar.

           Ma and Pa stumbled off to bed, having connected their young son, Jake, to the WWWeb, as all good parents hook-up their children every night. Neither checked the weather, which was always predictable.

           After nine straight hours of studying and five and a half more hours of mental work as district Garbage Enforcer, Pa was exhausted. A faint smile touched his lips. This was his favorite time of day, relaxing, as he plugged into the cerebral software that took him away into a fantastical role playing game. As his alpha waves went to theta, drawing him fully into the virtual reality world, Pa forgot the mundane life as Garbage Enforcer. Pa was a wizard.  Several bold swipes of his laser wand left bubbles in a stream in air. Pa slayed a fire-breathing Hacker Spider, so named for the ingenious ways they interfere with the WWWeb.

           Ma, who insisted that they live in an authentic Victorian house at the edge of Great Lake Erie, settled into a long winter's nap next to Pa in the bell tower. She connected directly into a Shakespearean play, Othello, in which she was programmed as Desdemona, the epitome of misunderstood femininity.

           The freakish weather-- now a foggy blizzard combined with an electrical storm-- moved in-land in an Erie Lake Effect. Swirling white mist rose from the deep water; a cloud bank reached shore and wisped through the forest to cling to the trees like Spanish moss. A giant web, spun by gray primitive spiders, was strung between two gnarled oaks in an intricate silk cat's-cradle. As they touched the threads, the molecules of fog froze into ice crystals that built onto themselves as structures, until, in a matter of moments, the suspended frost was thick as a nervous system. Then, a single bubble in air touched the web, and it shattered into slivers of ice.

           Lightning streaked the sky with icy fingers and arched across heavy gray clouds bursting with snow. A crash of thunder like warfare, and a flash of white, white light that was everywhere at once. Lightning struck an interesting feature of the modernized Gothic house: the ungrounded lightning rod atop the bell tower, in which sleeps Ma and Pa, and on the second floor, little Jake!

           Slates blasted off the roof; electricity surged along all the wires and circuits that wove through the house like neuromuscular filaments. Lightning traveled from the top of the rooftop to the middle of the double-story glass sphere: the .COM area, where multicolored sparks flew from the hologram Christmas tree like embers on new-fallen snow.

           Electricity raced through Address: eriegarbage.com, right down to the external hard drives connected by wires that are fed under Ma's and Pa's skin, through their skulls and into their brains. A shock was delivered to the end of each implanted miniature electrode, coated with cultured embryonic nerve cells that have sent out fibers to grow into symbiotic residence in their brains.

           Their brains fried, of course.

           The lightning strike fused Ma's and Pa's gray matter inside their heads. In the time it took for a nerve impulse to pass along an axon, Ma and Pa each experienced a last few seconds of stimulation to their glowing frontal lobes.

           Pa, magically alive across the universe, caught up in a state of euphoria, overloaded. He went ballistic. And for one shining moment, Pa's synapses met in a grand gestalt at the center of the reptilian brain stem, where he was a wizard engaged in slaying a monster. In death, he created, and exists forever in the dream he has entered on Nintendo wings.

           The electrical surge reached right into Ma's skull, into the central core of her reticular activating system, and destroyed her prefrontal areas right at the point in her program where Desdemona is explaining herself one more time. Light enveloped Ma and turned her worries and fears into prisms.

She and Pa continued to exist in another drive, a drive beyond A B or C. They combined into the D for Death drive. Instantaneously, they each passed on to a unique heaven. A Ho Ho Hell.

           Their corpses laid in a smoldering bed, lifeless pieces of meat smelling of burned flesh that shorted out the electrical charge. Ma and Pa acted like a circuit-breaker that saved their small son, Jake, from a direct hit.

           Asleep, Jake felt the defused lightning strike travel through his small form, like the weather. Like fog, electricity tingled along his infant brain-ganglion; it stimulated all the way down to his embryonic neurocirculatory system. Jake had been hooked up to the WWWeb all his short life. Ma constantly fed him programs, and Pa took an avid interest in building his data base. Jacob's closest bond was to the machine feeding him information directly into his brain. To WWWeb, there was never any question whether Jake was naughty or nice.

           To WWWeb, he was simply one more mind who believed his in-put. It was only coincidental that on this night, Jake was at an appropriate age to understand information that stimulated the temporal lobe, the part of his brain that holds imagination, the site of spiritual matters. He was programmed with a review of Santa Claus that introduced into his thinking, a mystical spirit that would conclude with an educational exposure of St. Nick as a myth, a fraud.

           For several intense moments, the electrical energy enhanced Jake's computer program. Wow, what a sudden neuronal network reconfiguration!

           Then, as sudden as a flash, the babe, Jake, was thrown off-line, disconnected totally from WWWeb.

           The program he was experiencing through virtual reality was interrupted: At the exact moment that Santa Claus, a right jolly old elf, had filled the red hook-up tubings hung with care from the holo orb, then laying a finger along his nose, up the solar collector he rose!

           Suddenly, gone was the static in Jake's head, the nagging broadcast. This was the first and only time Jake had existed completely alone, except his first three months in the womb tube. There was a glow from fire all around him as he sat up in bed, and removed his useless electronic headgear, and headed downstairs to the .COM area.

                                                                       *

           Flames have engulfed the bell tower, and are spreading to the glass sphere that covers the .COM area like a blister. Inside the cavernous space, smoke reaches like gray clouds filled with shadows and light. Embers, like new snow, fall here and there and ignite small fires. Jake approaches the WWWeb holo orb, an enormous glass sphere suspended in air. A bubble.

           Each day, he's allowed as reward, time to share virtual reality experience with WWWeb by entering the holo orb, now melting.

           Unmindful of the devastation, the danger all around him, Jake hangs his hollow red connector tube; he ties it to the mouse attached to the entertainment system he's known all his life, now showing a hologram fire. Or is this real? Jake can't be sure-- He's never known real.

           On the main control panel the time is flashing the number: 12:00 12:00 12:00.

           Jake's power source has cut out at midnight, Christmas Eve. And Jake believes in Santa Claus, because he was disconnected from WWWeb before his cerebral cortex gained access to the truth:

THERE IS NO SANTA CLAUS! St. Nick is a fantasy; a matter of imagination.

                                                           * * *

           HOO, hoooo; snoring is Santa, zonked in his overstuffed chair, upholstered in red satin and lined with white fur from a polar bear. He is dreaming he's Jake! Visions of spun -sugar dance in his head as he comes out of his deep, deep slumber. He's been in hibernation for a year.

           His first thought: It's Christmas Eve! He's weak, but slowly he becomes aware of a robust body. His mission is to visit every child in the world who believes in him. He sees the wee people working on toys throughout the workshop at this cold, frozen wasteland, the North Pole, where tonight it is real foggy.

           Now he recalls with a thrill, that every December 24-25, at midnight, he becomes everywhere at once. "That's my purpose!" he expounds with joy.

           Mrs. Santa Claus, fat and rosy, hustles into the busy shop holding a platter of gingerbread and a cup of hot chocolate with a candy cane for stirring. Darling Apple-Dumpling, as Santa calls her, daintily steps over the caboose of a G Scale train. It's driven by a pert engineer named Henry, and manned by a crew of helpful spirits dressed in light. Mrs. St. Nick is surrounded by bubbles of many sizes, unnatural bubbles that are here, then there, with no in between. They never pop.

           Santa's dream haunts him; his thoughts are like dancing sugar plums just out of reach. How weird. Real weird, that's how. Santa dreamed he was Jake, the very last little child who still believes in him. And he'd been surrounded by fire.

           But that couldn't be real. Because, beside his throne, which sits between two elaborately decorated blue spruce, is a magical sack-- the sack moves with surprises as if the canvas was alive! The sack is overflowing with stuff wrapped in gay paper and bows, enough toys and candy and magic tricks for millions of good boys and girls.

           Their tasks completed all the elves and spirit beings gather around him as he munches on a gingerbread man. With a flourish, Santa pulls the LIST from his fur-trimmed coat-pocket and with great importance, he reads: "Jacob Stump."

           It can't be! Santa, the eternal spirit, feels a strange da ja' vue. Like someone is dancing on his grave, or scattering his ashes. That is the only name written there, although Santa C. unfurls the list until he reaches the end of a long, long roll.

           Mrs. Claus tucks a wad of hot fudge wrapped in a green wool napkin inside his pants, right below his wide belt, and purrs, "Something to eat on your trip around the world in one night."

           Suddenly, he doesn't want to leave her, or the safety of the happy shop. But he recalls his dream with immediacy. He was a gullible little kid, Jake. He'd hung his long red tube in a strange faith: He'd believed... believed with a woman's heart, and with a man's courage, that Santa Claus would come.

The Saint feels weak-- doesn't trust himself. He puffs hard on his pipe and smoke rings his head. "Ho," he says.

           "Come with me to the stable," says Ms S Claus. He follows her outside, where the landscape resembles a frozen moon covered in dense mist and swirling snow.

           Santa cries out, "It's so foggy; look at this... I'll never find my way to Jake tonight!"

           A picture in gingham and frosted curls, his wife strains to open the barn door against a rising wind that turns the bubbles that emulate from her into a constant blur of spheres.

           Inside the stable, Santa goes first to hug Dancer, a huge buck with antlers branching out into many irregular horns. The deer kicks up the hay covering the floor, and the dust carries a musky sweet smell that clings to the bubbles in air like the odor of light.

           Santa Claus laughs from deep inside himself as he catches Comet in the arch of a mad leap, enveloping her in a mid-air embrace. All his reindeer are here, eager of hoof. Once they are harnessed to the sleigh packed with the bulging sack of gifts for Jake-- Anything Santa imagines the kid could want-- he calls them all by name. "Now Dasher! Now Dancer! Now, Prancer and Vixen! On, Comet! On, Cupid! On, Donner and Blitzen!"

           The sleigh, with him driving, all lively and quick, lifts into the turbulent sky filled with both ice and fog. The crack of his whip in air breaks the sound barrier, and produces a stream of bubbles that fan out, spreading over the planet.

           "From the North Pole! From the top of the world! Now dash away-- Dash away! Dash away all!!!!!"

           Santa grabs his fur-trimmed collar and wraps his face in it, glad for his long white tangled beard. There is thunder, lightning, and snow freshly released from dark clouds that envelope him in a gray mass that plays the aurora borielis overhead.

           Guided by only the North star and a magnetic balance inside his brain, Santa zooms across Lake Erie. When he's still more than a mile offshore, the effect of his sleigh through the air causes the trees on shore to whip violently in the wind. The numerous cobwebs stung among the branches, turned to ice crystals by the freezing fog, break into thousands of slivers, with a sound like wind chimes inside a gyroscope. The same sound as prisms of light make, when they bounce.

                                                           ******

           At that very moment, Jake hears on the smoldering housetop, a sound suggestive of a sleigh full of toys and St. Nicholas too. He looks up through the domed plexiglass melting above his head. When what to his wondering eyes should appear? But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer.

           He knows in a micro-burst moment it must be St. Nick!

           Up on the geodesic dome that tops the .COM area, like a little old peddler, Santa steps from the sleigh with his sack flung over one shoulder. He slips on smooth black ice. His nails make a screeching sound as he scrapes down the melting skylight. "Ho!" he exclaims. "Ho, ho!" He manages to grab hold of the ungrounded lightning-rod even as it attracts a direct strike.

           In the middle of the cavernous room, lit by strobes of lightning reflecting off the fog and snow, and filled with smoke and bubbles like rainbows awash with aurora borielis, Jake stands transfixed. A spirit bursts out of the WWWeb holo orb with a bound, as thunder rumbles like an erupting volcano.

           He is dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot. And his clothes are all tarnished with ashes and soot, and dirty ice drips from his whiskers, and even his long eyelashes.

           The old Saint appears face-to-face with the innocent Jake, and it's a mirror image-- old and young, yin and yang, beginning and ending-- Opposite but complementary-- Santa and the one who believes in Santa.

           They each laugh at the sight of themself. A wink of opposite eyes soon gives each to know they have nothing to dread.

           They speak not a word, but each fulfills their purpose.

           Jake believes. And Santa fills his red connector tubing, then turns with a jerk. And poking his finger way up in his nose. And giving a loud snort and a, "Heh, heh. Ho ho," up the holo orb he goes.

           Smoke blends with the strange fog. The entire structure of the house is in flames and all the glass is bursting from the heat. The atmosphere turns to steam; Jake lifts his face and raises his arms and feels his blistered skin relieved by cold bubbles.

           A flaming beam crashes to the floor not 30 feet from him, but his attention is on the bulging red tube hung from melting plastic. It is filled with magic, something to which young Jake has never before been exposed-- It is fascinating. It is like an animal living inside him. It is like a walk outside in the woods; like the weather.

           Jake searches the red tube, and discovers way down in the toe, a box wrapped in tin paper with lace and three big red bows. Inside is the means of his own destruction. Santa has left Jake a computer hook-up all his very own.

           Delighted, Jake attaches the brilliant red state-of-the-art brain probes. He hooks them up to the connections implanted in his skull, and a built-in cold-fusion generator provides power. He springs with his mind right into the machine and some of his connectors give a low whistle. At once, Jake is re-connected with WWWeb, like a bubble in a wad of scum as it's drawn to the sewer. Inside Jake's head, the program suddenly takes up at the exact spot where he'd left off in the collective consciousness: SANTA CLAUS-- A MYTH, with origins in Norway, blah, blah>>

           WWWeb immediately alerts 911 to save Jake from the house engulfed in flames, and changes his DNA, and reassigns him to a different .COM address.

           That is the end of Santa Claus: St. Nick doesn't exist.

           Because not one soul believes in him. He fades off into the clouds that cover the full moon, like the cold fog filled with bubbles that, with daybreak, returns to the rivers and lakes and oceans.

           But, in that part of himself that could never be mapped or counted, or exactly mirrored, Jake thought he heard Santa Claus exclaim, like a self-referential echo, as he rode out of sight, "Merry Whristmas to all. And to all, a good ^^^^^^^^^ WWWebsite!"

                                                                       THE END