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Adam Coe
Toward a More Precise Identification of Angels Some people get to die heroically in the chaos of the battlefield, fighting for their country. Some people get to die in the throes of ecstasy, killed by a jealous lover. Some people get to die surrounded by their loved ones after a long and fulfilling life. I got to die in a giant plastic box, surrounded by strangers in a mall, having just purchased a pair of khaki pants. I was 22, and my greatest professional achievement as a technical writer was my authorship of the directions to the "Gergen's Rugged Waffle Making System." I'm sure I would have won many awards for this work, posthumously of course, had the company not gone bankrupt as a result of numerous lawsuits involving faulty wiring and fires that gave several homes golden crisp ridges. Toledo has many hotspots in its nightlife, if you consider playing miniature golf a chic and exciting late night activity. But even the thrill of bouncing primary color balls off Euclidean fantasies can lose its sparkle by 9 PM, so we fled the neon lights of Putt-Putt, traveled down the long gray expanse of Toledo's two-lane superhighway, and reassembled under the full fluorescent lights of a nearby mall. It was there I bought the aforementioned khakis [Dockers "Relaxed Fit," meaning large-assed], and discovered an in-mall demonstration of the "Hydromassage." Modern technology had produced a device where you lay in a giant box completely covered in plastic, and high-pressure streams of water are shot at you in an effort to release muscle tension. I had spent the entire day searching for typos in camera instructions and making anagrams out of the word "Panasonic" when I got bored, so I volunteered. As I was climbing in, I thought about my greatest triumph of the day, a hole-in-one on the 11th hole, a hole my friends had deemed impossible. I had done a little victory dance that vaguely resembled the Macarena if you somehow incorporated a putter. As the message started, one of the electrical connections to the motor came loose, adding electrolysis to my massge, free of charge [or not, depending on how you look at it]. Some people's last thoughts are confessions or regrets. Some people go out realizing something important about their life, why people were put on this earth at all. My last thoughts involved a mechanical pirate that swung his legs open and shut over a hole in his ship. The makers of "Hydromassage" settled quietly out of court with my parents, who sued the company in order to pay for my funeral and the remodeling of the house. They could have buried me in the machine itself and saved enough money to retile the roof as well. Paramedics say I didn't feel much pain, which is supposed to be a comfort, I guess, like a consolation prize, the home version of the game when you miss the Final Jeopardy Question. Feeling no pain is what you get when you can't remember what the capital of Kenya was called before it was Nairobi. Lots of people talk about a bright light, seeing your soul dissociate from your body, all sorts of junk that they think death is like. Let me tell you, death comes as a complete shock, especially when you don't expect it. The afterlife was decorated kind of like a dentist's waiting room. We're talking a desk with a secretarial looking woman behind it, 40ish, kinda mousy, curly gray hair and glasses, papers scattered on the desk, and a plant. Light background music, the kind that always sounds familiar but you can';t recall where you heard it before. A print of a Norman Rockwell painting on the wall. Life Magazine on the table. Nothing to indicate that I was here for anything besides a routine cleaning. I went up to the desk and started to ask where I was, but the woman cut me off by handing me a packet of papers and saying "Here, fill these out, give them back to me, and an attendant will be here to see you shortly." "Great," I said, moronically. I say down and thumbed through the questions, which were all about my life, including job [technical writer], religion [agnostic], and how often I committed the seven deadly sins [not as often as I would have liked]. I did the best I could, and handed the packet back to mouse-woman, who stood up and disappeared, which was surprising. I started to thumb through a magazine, but I wasn't really reading the article very carefully. A man walked in, startling me into dropping the magazine. he was wearing brown shoes with a navy-blue suit, violating one of the few fashion rules I know. He took off his hat to reveal wispy jet-black hair. "You're . . ." he glanced down at some papers in his hands. "Mr. Pileggi then?" I winced as he mispronounced my name. "Yeah, Mr. Pileggi," I rolled the G's the way it's supposed to be said. "Follow me," he said, taking me back behind the desk to another room. I entered what was presumably his office, which felt like an insurance agent's. A bigger desk this time, two chairs, papers arranged into two piles: "Saved" and "Damned," and a big brass paperweight that said "7 Deadlies." A small nameplate explained that I was currently at the desk of Thanatos. He started skimming through my forms and began to chuckle. "Agnostic, eh? I bet this answers a lot of questions." "What do you mean?" "Well . . . this is the afterlife. The Great Beyond. You're dead now. Here's where we decide what to do with you." "I'm confused, I thought St. Peter did this." "He retired." "How'd you wind up with the job?" "Well, I used to be the Greek god of death, essentially Hades' personal assistant. Anyways, my department was downsized in the Great Religion Contraction awhile ago, but they still need someone to do the paperwork and I had experience in the field, so here I am." "Ah." Thanatos took a look at my file and said "Ohhhhhhhhhkayyyyy . . . So you're a writer? go down the hall, take the fifth left, then the third door on the right. That'll take you to the creative artist's wing where they'll have your file." I was still confused, but it seemed easier to follow this instructions and figure things out as I went along, since no one had yet made sense anyways. The concept that I was deceased was gradually making its way through my mind, but I wasn't exactly sure what to do with it. I found myself in front of a door that said "Artist Section" in big black letters. I walked in to see several clusters of cubicles and one of those "take a number" machines. The little piece of paper sticking out said "1." I had never been number 1 my entire life, a fact that remained technically unaltered, given the circumstances. Soon a voice from the back called out "Number one?" and I walked toward it. The afterlife seemed like it was just a never-ending series of desks; this one had a short balding man behind it, looking at me expectantly. "Here, let me see your form and then I'll go find your file, and we'll get you squared away. Any questions before I go?" This seemed as good a time as any to find out what was happening. I said, "How exactly does this work? I mean, I know I'm in the afterlife, but what's going on with all the forms, the special department for artists? Does every job have its own department?" "Well, sort of," he said. "Jobs are broken into classes: lawyers, doctors, food service, clergy, or, in your case, writers, etc." "Why?" "Religion Diversification. See, in the Beginning, it was easy, the rules were simple: Don't Eat the Apple. But that turned out to be too difficult for humans. I always knew the free will thing was a mistake. Even after that, the basic procedure was pretty straightforward: Do God's Will. Do it, and go to heaven, break his laws and you've gotten yourself a ticket to hell. But then religion came into the picture. Everyone started to have different codes, different ways of looking at God, different names: Allah, Yahweh, Zeus . . . it became a mess. So the rigid moral code had to be thrown out, otherwise most of the world was screwed, so we had to take a more liberal approach and look at how people had overall lived their lives." "This created another problem. How do you measure up the worth of a person? Priests have it east. Their whole life is pious. Even when they shit, it's holy. So are they automatically better than a really good car mechanic, the kind that fixes the problem right off and never overcharges? How about a plumber who shows up on time and never smells bad? Is an only somewhat competent doctor better than a really good janitor just because of his profession? Not everyone was good at biology in high school. What if you're particauly talented at sweeping floors and derive intense enjoyment out of it? Should you be penalized for your lack of a stethoscope? Even standards based on charity are difficult to analyze. When you have lots of money, it's easy to give, but should the rich get the fast track to heaven?" "We realized there were a lot of difficult questions, so we decided to try and judge people based on their peers, people that came from similar lives. This way we can better understand who was good, and who made a mess of things. Hence The System, a series of different offices that look at the particulars of each case and try to apply the standards of each area of life to the individual. We are, in essence, working toward a more precise identification of angels." "So you evaluate people based on what, their ratio of good deeds to bad?" "More like what they accomplished given what skills they started with. We decide the fate of each soul on a case-by-case basis." "So it's sorta like a credit agency for your eternal soul, huh?" "Call it what you like." "That must be a hell of a job." "It is." There was this awkward silence, which was unnerving, because I would have thought awkward silences were strictly an earthly phenomenon. My soul creditor got up and left the room. I sat there and hummed for a bit, then stopped out of fear that I was out of tune. Or could you hum out of tune in heaven? Did everyone have perfect pitch? What if someone started to hum something I really didn't like? I hated Michael Bolton, did they have Him in heaven? What if Bolton was some sort of demi-god, revered throughout the afterlife as the height of musical talent? Could I go to hell just for disliking him? And would I maybe be better off there, in never-ending pain but, at least, Bolton-free? Or would he follow me there, just to make my eternal torment worse? What if I was right on the heaven/hell line, and hating Bolton pushed me over the edge? I decided if they asked me about Bolton, I'd pretend to not know who he was and change the subject. Was it wrong to lie in order to get to heaven? Could it even be done? I began to regret the Metallica CD I had bought back in high school just to seem cool. Back then, I had no idea things could be so complicated. If only I had known. I was so worried about pop music that I didn't notice my guy return, and when I noticed him, he was looking intently at a file which I could only presume was mine and which was disturbingly small. "Let me be honest with you," he said. "You haven't really done anything significant with your life as a writer. You've had a couple of minor things published, but you got a C- in your creative writing class in high school, and you dropped out of college. On the other hand, you never really had much of a chance. You were killed in a freak accident before you had the time to develop as much as a person. You weren't remarkable in any way, as a success or a failure." "There may be a sort of compromise we can work out though. It says here that you've worked as a technical writer; maybe you can work here. We always need new people for writing . . . I mean, the kind of manpower required to keep eternity running is ridiculous. I don't understand how God ever expected to do it on his own anyway. We'd start you off at entry-level work . . . you would be a holy underwriter. If you do well there, you can be promoted all the way up to archangel. It'll take time, but time you've got. I know this seems kind of strange, but it's the best I can offer at the moment. Otherwise you can wait in purgatory and see what else comes up, but trust me, this is better. What do you say?" I didn't feel like I had much of a choice at this point. At first the idea of having to work for all of eternity pissed me off, but then I started thinking: what else would I have done? I'd been brought up to believe that heaven was just one long church service, and I could barely sit through an hour of that a week. I couldn't imagine enjoying it forever. And the hours aren't bad, and there's a certain amount of creative control that heaven lets you have. They realized early that I wasn't good at sending memos out, so eventually I was transferred to the "Signs from God" department. As long as I get the basic idea across, I'm allowed to have God or Jesus or whoever appear in any form I want. I've been hanging out with the other writers here and we compete to see who can use visions the most creatively. Each week we have a contest to see who can pick the most unusual place for Jesus to appear. Last week I won for putting him in a Twinkie. There's plenty of socializing as well. Last night I was at a party and met the guy who came up with "God works in mysterious wars," who is a legend around here. A former Unitarian, he said he originally came up with the concept to fuck with agnostics, but it caught on and made him famous. We exchanged cloud numbers and are supposed to meet for coffee later. Ever since I started working here, I realized that mortal life is starting to make more sense. All my life I had wondered if there was some central force in the universe, some sort of unifying idea that made everything go 'round. I could never figure out what it was, but now I realize I was looking for the wrong thing. What drives life anymore isn't love, or justice, or even God; the primary motive force of the world is whimsy. Guys like me are in charge, and we get bored easily with all of eternity on our hands, so we try and keep things interesting. Maybe an overly serious man starts to cross the street against the light and so bam! Hit by a falling pig. A lot of the time, it doesn't make sense. Sometimes, that's the point. |
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ISSN 2150-6795 |