The Department of Fear
The Department of Fear’s reception is held at the Washington Hilton, whose Function Hall for the occasion has been decorated in medieval style, with gibbets and the chemically preserved bodies of plague-victims, their boils frozen for all eternity, hanging from the rafters. A quartet is playing Shostakovich on theremins.
The attendees are a mixture of the rising stars of the conservative firmament and the worst ghouls of Washington’s hadal ecosystem where slimy life wars for namedrops like their undersea cousins for pieces of a dead whale. At the centre of the crowd, the Procurator General for Fear holds court and pontificates with a glass of contaminated milk in hand. His body is like an asteroid with something larger and older than the republic moving beneath his orange-blotched spongy exoskeleton, and his voice is that of a horrible metal insect imitating human speech. He has launched into one of his favourite spiels: “…and they’ll tell you fear is a weakness. A flaw in the firmware. They’ll sell you apps to meditate it away, pills to flush it from your cerebrospinal fluid, weighted blankets to swaddle you from the nocturnal tremble.” He pauses, taking a slow sip. A drop of prion-thick liquid clings to his lower lip and the thirty-something Catholic hotwives that surround him bite theirs at the sight of it. They all look like they’re from Absolutely Fabulous and the men all have bowties, each of them hoping to be among the fortunate ones to catch the gift of the Procurator General’s seed… “They are liars. Fear is the only honest emotion. The sole sacrament. Love can be counterfeited, joy can be synthesised, but fear — true, marrow-deep, hair-raising fear — that is the fingerprint of the real. When a man is afraid, he is not pretending to be anything. He is, for one glorious moment, nothing but his authentic self: meat with a shivering ghost inside. Fear, for lack of a better word, is good.” He flourishes a pause and winks to a Vanity Fair journalist who fans herself and starts mentally blocking out a new chapter in her future tell-all. “Fear is God.”
Applause and appreciative murmurs from the toadies.
A bald protolich openly fondles his pregnant wife’s breasts while holding forth on the Founding Fathers’ intent to establish a based crusader state. A silver-haired young senator from Colorado is locked in conversation with a pair, one half of which wears the head of a raven and the other a lion; Brad Samutpada, the frontman for Uggo & the Stickmen, invited because none of the musicians the attendees actually like wanted anything to do with them or else were fully booked with court appearances on charges of statutory rape, looks for a way out of a circle of mugwumps it’s becoming increasingly clear have mistaken him for Ted Nugent.
The Procurator General holds out his glass, and an attendant who looks and smells like a beaten dog dressed up as a Mormon creeps forward to refill it from a canteen made out of a bear uterus. “Let me tell of the colossal squid I found washed up on Rehoboth Beach…”