The Auditor
Imagine an entity that called us on our bullshit.
Gods did exist.
They’re all dead now, of course. Crumbling fusions of bone and star fading into the dark. Butchered by the ideas that shaped the Earth. Science, progress, the calming influence of logic and understanding, a death sentence to higher powers.
All gone now. Lost forever.
The Pantheon of Pedantry were born.
Not Gods, nowhere near, but still more than Human.
The Auditor, the Grand Time Waster, The Duke of Passive Aggression and their childish runt of a companion, One-Up. Left to live on Earth, left to ensure Humanity could never truly be comfortable, left… alone.
The Auditor, Sebastian, his name tonight, swirled the little stick with the plump olive clockwise in his martini. Spin the bottle, but with an upmarket twist.
It clinked and pinged in the wide-rimmed glass as it came to rest facing a group of four portly, chubby men. Successful celebrated men. At least in this room, at least tonight.
The pinstripe plonks all chuckled in a way that wasn’t dissimilar to pigs feasting at a trough.
Hearty snorts and belly rolls jiggling under tight expensive shirts, where if the buttons were placed under any more stress they might well fire off like a lone gunman spraying the party’s guests.
One in particular stood out to Sebastian. He would make a good pick, a likely source of bollocks and buffoonery.
He studied him now as he gnawed at the olive, morsels falling back into the clear liquid of the cocktail. Flavour for later, what a delight.
The man was holding court. Sebastian listened as he ranted between sips of fizzy lager, declaring things, telling it how it is. Proper men. Proper women. Soft lads. Snowflakes. The whole tired banquet.
Sebastian ate bullshit.
He feasted on arrogant anecdotes, sucked the hyperbole right off the vine. Every embellishment, a little jewel to be fondled, plucked and pocketed as people wittered on about their incredible lives.
This man was dripping with jus.
Sebastian enjoyed this part. Those final few moments before the pageantry began.
He shook himself loose a little, clicked his tongue at a nearby waiter and deftly placed the glass down. Not before finishing the contents, with a slight chew, in one almighty gulp.
‘I’ll have another in five minutes please, chap.’ And without looking, Sebastian plucked a twenty-pound note from his inside breast pocket and let it drop as silent as a leaf in autumn into the young man’s hand.
‘Add it to their tab.’
Two languid strides later he stood shoulder to shoulder with the man who was greying but putting up a fight whilst doing so.
‘Good evening Gentlemen, what an absolute riot this is. The place to be, without question. What are we all drinking?’
The men greeted Sebastian with forced warmth, seeing him as some elite eccentric they vaguely recognised as someone they should respect but couldn’t quite place.
Graham narrowed his eyes.
‘Ah, good to see you again.’
Sebastian considered lying, but lying to a liar always felt wasteful.
‘No worries if you’ve forgotten me. The Auditor.’
‘Right.’
‘Capital A. Definite article.’
‘Like tax?’ All four shifted their weight like buffalo at the watering hole.
Sebastian smiled.
‘No, bullshit.’
The men liked that. Men like that always did.
‘Graham was just telling us about Bangkok,’ said one of them, disinterested enough to lurch back to funnier waters.
The others chuckled.
‘Tell him the story, go on!’
Graham began retelling the anecdote, clearly exaggerated and full of bravado.
A work trip. A free upgrade. A rooftop bar. A woman so beautiful she apparently caused three waiters to forget their orders. Graham, naturally, had handled the situation with the calm command of a man born for international incidents and minibar prices.
His friends added jeers and laughter, throwing in exaggerated details to back him up.
‘And I’m not funny about it,’ Graham said, preparing to be very funny about it indeed. ‘Men are men. Women are women. I like proper women. Always have. None of this soft confusion.’
There it was.
The in.
The bullshit rose from him like frothing coffee.
As Graham got to the ‘climax’ of the story, reality subtly paused. Drinks froze mid-air, someone caught mid-laugh stayed that way, mouth open, head back.
Sebastian smiled, buttoned his blazer and said to himself, ‘Let’s get to the truth of it, shall we?’
A faint ripping-paper sound followed as the room stuttered.
Sebastian appeared in a shadowy, warped version of the hotel room in the story. Time and space were rubbery, logic buttery. Everything was in flux, like a hazy memory.
The rooftop bar went first. Never happened.
The business class upgrade went next. Points.
The three waiters forgot nothing.
The woman had not begged. Nobody had begged.
Then the room settled, smaller and more accurate.
The woman was a man.
Not a trap waiting at the end of the anecdote for Graham to twist.
Graham knew the whole time. Asked specifically.
Sebastian watched the true scene play out.
The sex worker told him before the second drink, even rubbing his shaved Adam’s apple as proof. Sebastian thought of the knees he was shaved from, those of the old Gods and laughed.
Plain as day. Graham nodded. Graham stayed. Graham laughed too loudly. Graham checked nobody from work was in the bar. Graham said he was not that kind of man. Then Graham stayed anyway.
They had talked.
For hours.
About love and life. About how every success felt smaller than the one before.
And disarmingly, staring into each other’s eyes, they shed the performing certainty required by men who had to be like Graham.
The guy listened.
Patiently.
‘Happens more than you think, baby,’ he said.
Sebastian liked him immediately.
There had been no conquest. No roaring masculine victory. No unforgettable display of heterosexual excellence. There had been a hotel balcony, two cigarettes, one untouched bottle of overpriced gin and Graham crying into a monogrammed towel because he had not been honest for so long that the first attempt had made him dizzy.
The climax was beautiful.
Graham giving him the night of his life went first.
Then the gag about not knowing.
Then the line about proper women.
Then the biggest morsel.
I didn’t know.
Sebastian feasted as if it were the halls of Valhalla and he should know. He was there.
And as was his very nature, when Sebastian was finished he even produced his own napkin of sorts. A sheet of dot matrix paper, perforated on either edge directly out of his tummy and in triplicate.
The room popped back into rhythm. Reality resumed.
‘Was that a printer?’ one asked.
‘This is for you, Graham.’ Sebastian offered the print-out.
Graham took the paper in a daze.
‘What is it?’
‘Your claim reduced by 94%. Quite a whopper.’
Graham went to object, pink rising on his face.
But Graham knew.
Graham had stayed.
Graham had liked him.
The group didn’t realise time had stopped. Graham tried to chuckle.
‘No, then I gave him the night of his life—’
He stopped.
Tried again.
‘And then I—’
Nothing.
His mouth worked around the lie and found nowhere to put it.
A small panic crept across his face.
‘No.’
The piggies waited.
‘No, that’s not right.’
‘What?’ one of them said.
Graham stared at his drink.
‘I knew.’
‘Knew what?’
‘About him.’
The silence was magnificent.
Graham tried to laugh.
It came out honest, so it barely came out at all.
‘I knew before we went upstairs.’
He stopped again, searched for an escape, found every exit audited and locked.
The room had nothing for him.
No jeers.
No mate, leave it.
Certainly no rescue.
Not even a chorus of pigs.
Only Graham, standing in the tiny cleared space where his bullshit had been.
‘He told me,’ Graham said.
Sebastian chewed.
Graham made one last attempt.
‘It was just a laugh.’
His lips twitched.
The sentence died.
‘It wasn’t.’
There it was.
Better.
‘He was kind to me,’ Graham said. ‘And I liked him. I liked Prasert.’
‘Who the fuck is Pratsert?‘ one of the pigs honked.
Graham deserved this.
Not because being gay was wrong. Quite the opposite. And not because desire was wrong. It made the world go round.
No, because every man there had heard Graham call other people soft. Had heard him build a little throne out of other people’s shame and climb onto it in polished shoes.
‘I liked him,’ Graham said again, because now there was nothing else available.
Sebastian reached into the left pocket of his black jeans. Skintight to his legs, the material put up a fight.
Sebastian slowly retracted his fingers one by one. Clad in yellow rings of potato starch and sunflower oil, he jazzed his fingers at them, wiggled them suggestively, playfully even.
One-by-one he ate them straight from the knuckle, licked the speckles of seasoning right off the skin. He stopped short of sucking his fingers clean, not wanting to come across perverted.
Graham looked at him properly.
‘Who are you?’
‘Sebastian, by the way.’
‘No. What are you?’
Sebastian dabbed at his lips with perforated sincerity.
Sebastian ate bullshit, because he was the Auditor.
And he liked Hula Hoops too, barbecue flavour, of course.
Around them, the room altered by fractions.
A man near the buffet admitted his yacht belonged to his brother-in-law.
Another conceded he had not almost gone professional.
Somebody by the windows confessed that nobody had called him a visionary, not in those words, not even close.
The air improved.
But the world remained full of bullshit.
Business tomorrow looked promising.
Oh, what a shame what happened next.
The Pantheon of Pedantry’s time was coming to an end.
By Louis Urbanowski
A story idea I’ve had for a long time. Every annoyance, irritation and irksome thing about life is because of the Pantheon of Pedantry. The problem is while life without all of this crap sounds pleasant, perhaps we best be careful what we wish for.
Another fantastic, juicy piece. Thank you for sharing 🙏