by R. E. Vance
“Then who does know?”
Penemue shook his head. “That is not for—”
“Don’t give me that shit. ‘Not for mortal knowledge,’ ” I mocked. “The gods are gone, and that shit doesn’t fly anymore.”
“If you had allowed me to finish,” Penemue said, “I would have said, ‘mortals or Others to know.’ Only the gods may know. And, as you have just observed, they are gone.”
“Jean,” Bella said, “I might be able to shed some light on this. When I was in Heaven, I saw carvings on golden pillars, the ones that I told you about. There were several depictions of humans being lifted from earth by celestial bodies. What Penemue said is true—the gods did take humans to do things for them.”
“Like what?”
“Prophesize and …” Bella hesitated.
“What?”
“Explore.”
↔
“Explore? What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t really know. I’m only going off the carving I saw, but as best I can tell, the gods can’t go everywhere. They need humans—well, more specifically, human souls—to open up certain pathways. There were a bunch of carvings that showed these souls entering domains to other worlds, planes of existence. I really don’t know what to call them.”
“And what happened to them?”
“They disappeared,” she said. “I haven’t had long enough to properly study them all, but as best I can tell, these explorers never come back.”
I looked at the angel. “I don’t suppose you know anything about this?”
“I do not,” Penemue said in a flat tone. “I know nothing about what Bella speaks of … nor have I heard of these golden pillars. You must understand, Jean-Luc, that there were places in Heaven forbidden to us. Now that Bella is alone in Heaven, she has access to rooms in that mansion that no angel or human soul has ever seen.”
“Oh, great. So we don’t know what happened to him, and as best we can tell, he was sent on some one-way ticket out of here. Fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK!”
“I am sorry,” Penemue said.
“Don’t you ever get sick of apologizing?”
Penemue grimaced at my words. “You are right, Human. I do apologize too much. So indulge me one last apology: this is where we say goodbye. It is time for you to go home and for me to continue my penance.”
The twice-fallen lifted a taloned finger and started ripping a hole in the darkness like tearing a cloth.
“No,” I said.
“We had a deal, Human Jean-Luc—your father’s story before your departure.”
“Yes,” I said, “but that story isn’t over yet. Take me back to my mom. I need to know what happens with her.”
Penemue sighed as he considered my request.
“The story isn’t done. Not until I see that part of it,” I said.
Penemue nodded. “You are correct, Human Jean-Luc Matthias. Your mother’s part in the story hadn’t finished. What do you wish to know about her?” he asked, clearly skeptical about my delay tactics.
Except they weren’t delay tactics. There was more to this story that I wanted to know. “You’re the soul-reader,” I said. “And you know my soul, do you not? So you tell me.”
Penemue tilted his head as if confused. Then a small smile touched the corner of his lips. He nodded. “Very well, my friend. Let us finish this story.”
Rubbing his hands together, he blew one last time.
Anything, Everything
We were transported back to my mom’s bedroom. Empty tissue boxes were littered about. So were a couple tubs of rotting ice cream buckets. Guess Mom was the cliché, drown-your-sorrows-in-ice-cream kind of gal. But who could blame her? The love of her life was gone.
And all I felt—all we felt—was that sorrow.
I’d like to say that the scene was overwhelming—soul-crushing—terrible, and leave it at that. But I can’t, because it was also familiar.
I drew Bella in close, grateful that my pain had healed. She had come back to me.
My mother would not be so lucky. She would never know what happened to my father. Where he went, or why. For all she knew, he’d gotten cold feet and ran away.
And running away isn’t always just across state lines. Sometimes people take more permanent measures to make sure they can never come back.
There were maps on the walls. Letters and notes to herself. She was trying to find him. Well, she was trying to find him until this day.
My mother walked in from the hallway, holding a 1970s pee stick. Empty Hell, those things were huge back then.
She stared at it intently, waiting for the blue or pink stripe to appear. I could sense her anticipation. There was dread in her emotions, except the dread was not for any one outcome, but for either outcome.
She dreaded being pregnant. And she equally dreaded not being pregnant.
The thing about dread is that it cannot exist without its opposite, and I felt my mother’s hope as well.
Her eyes widened. She frantically grabbed the box to confirm what she was seeing, and the rush of feelings that followed were too complicated to unravel. Hope, fear, joy, sadness—they all mixed together in the kaleidoscope of emotions that make us human.
But there was one thing I could sense above all: peace. She had already accepted the outcome and had chosen to make the most of it.
As if sensing the monumental change that was coming, there was a knock on the door, followed by my PopPop’s voice. “Honey, I got pizza. Want me to bring you a slice?”
My mother didn’t answer, and I could hear PopPop sigh from the other side of the door.
“I ahhh … know this has been a tough few weeks for you, and although I don’t know exactly what’s going on with you, I can guess. A bad breakup. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but when your mom left, I locked myself away, too. So yeah, I’m going to guess it was a breakup.”
There was a pause, followed by another sigh. This was the one he gave whenever he was debating saying or doing something. “You know what got me through it? You did, honey. Seeing you every day. Your smile, your giddiness. Your stubbornness. All of it. You got me through it. And if … if there’s any way I can help you get through this, well, know I’m there for you, whatever it is.”
More silence, but now my mom was crying.
My PopPop stood at the door for a long moment before I heard the shuffling of his feet.
My mother called after him. “Do you mean it?”
“Mean it, honey?”
“You’ll do anything?”
“Of course. Anything.”
“I think you’re going to regret that,” my mom said as a smile so big it touched her eyes painted her face.
↔
There was more crying, some yelling, but my PopPop meant what he said. Anything. And as Penemue guided us through the next few months of my mother’s life, I felt her peace. And her joy.
She always wondered what happened to my father. But she also saw that he hadn’t left her alone at all. There was someone coming to keep her company in his absence.
Me.
↔
“Is that the end of the story you wished to know?”
“Not quite,” I said. “I want to see one last thing. Well, feel one last thing. It was something you’ve told me about before, and I want to feel it for myself.”
“Are you sure? I truly do not know how the human mind will handle such an experience.”
I closed my eyes as I contemplated what I wanted to know—to feel—and then nodded. “Yes … but Bella, you don’t have—”
“We’re in this together,” she said, coming up behind me, “in this life and the next.”
“Very well, then.” Penemue rubbed his hands together and took me to the moment of my mother’s death.
I’ll Love You Forever, I’ll Like You for Always
Three days after I was born, my mother died. It wasn’t fair and I will forever hate fate or destiny or the gods or the cold, uncaring
universe for doing that to me. My mother died and I was robbed all the kisses and cuddles, songs and stories, reprimands and laughs that so many take for granted.
But life is what it is … and I had my PopPop to care for me. And my PopPop had me.
So when Penemue transported us to the hospital on the day she died, I felt pain. Incredible, unrelenting pain that was unlined by one emotion burning so bright it locked away the agony, making it barely an afterthought.
Joy.
Joy for what was coming.
Joy for who was coming.
That was what my mother was feeling above all else, and to say that my heart simply swelled with joy would be like comparing a kitten to a lion, a paper airplane to a jumbo jet. It doesn’t compare, because I was feeling what she was feeling, but I also had my own joy because I could share this with her.
And I felt fear for what was coming.
In brief, I felt every emotion in stereo, and I honestly didn’t know if I could stand much more of it.
Then, with a final and intense release, the pain stopped as the air filled with the wailing of a newborn.
There I was, bloody and screaming for all my worth.
“You’re … you’re perfect,” Bella said, holding me tight and giving my heart one more thing to rejoice for.
And just when I thought there would be no more, that the zenith of this experience had finally peaked, the doctors handed little me over to my mother and I felt the swelling of her heart, as well as the undefined comfort of a newborn meeting his mother for the first time.
It was magnanimous, a feeling that I would carry with me forever.
Mother and child together. All was right with the world.
Then it wasn’t.
The doctors moved around, reading charts, looking at my mother, checking vitals. Not that she noticed—she had me and that was all she saw. All she could experience.
A nurse came to take me away, but my mother refused. “Just to clean him up,” she said. “I’ll bring him right back.”
But from the stolen glance the nurse gave the doctor, we knew this not to be completely true. They needed to clean me up, yes, but they also needed to get my mom some care.
The doctors wheeled my mother to another room and inserted a needle attached to a bag of blood. “A precaution,” they said. “You lost a lot of blood and we want to make sure you’re strong for your baby.”
“Jean-Luc,” my mother said.
“Excuse me?”
“Jean-Luc. I need to be strong for Jean-Luc.”
“Yes,” the doctor said, her smile filled with both joy and sadness. “For Jean-Luc.”
↔
The nurse was true to her word. I was returned. And when the doctor came back, she had my PopPop in tow. My mother noticed the worry in her father’s eyes, the concern that the doctor had when entering. She knew something was wrong.
She didn’t care. She had me.
And there wasn’t a force on this Earth that would take me from her arms again.
But death isn’t a force of this Earth or any other. It’s an immutable law and the thread that binds us all. And when death comes for us, nothing can stop her.
Death came late that night. I guess the cruel bitch thought her delay a kindness, having given my mother a few hours with her child.
Death came as my mother was singing me a lullaby. The last words that she said before embracing the end of her life were, “My life for his. Fair deal. More than fair.”
And what I felt wasn’t fear or anger or the disappointment of being robbed of a lifetime with her son. What I felt was hope … hope that I would grow up strong. Hope that I would be happy.
Hope that I would live well.
Hope that lasted until the end of her last breath.
Hope that was replaced by a nothing so complete I thought I had gone with her to whatever came next.
↔
“So that’s how she died,” I said. I don’t know what I expected to feel. I guess part of me thought I’d be overwhelmed by the experience, that it would bring me to my knees. But it didn’t. What I felt after my mother died was gratitude that I was able to be with her at that last moment, both in body as a baby, and in spirit as the man I had become.
The twice-fallen sighed, tears of light turning his eyes into strobes of empathy. “Is that the end you were looking for? For if it is …” He lifted his hand, opening a portal to the outside.
“No,” I said, “that isn’t the end. Not for me … and not for you.”
You Don’t Have to Die to Commit Suicide
“I don’t understand,” Penemue said. “There is no more I can tell you.” As he spoke, the frozen scene of EightBall’s childhood living room manifested around us.
“There is,” I said.
Penemue gave me a curious look as he searched through what he knew of me—both from what he read on my soul before the gods left, and from the years of friendship—to see what my angle was. And from the utter confusion painting his face, I could tell he had no idea what I meant to do.
“But I have told you everything about your father and mother as it pertains to you and—”
“No, you haven’t,” I said. “I still don’t know where he was from or who his family was. And to truly understand him, I also need to know about his father—my grandfather. Then there’s also my father’s father’s father. I’ll need to know their history as well. And if you really think about it, you can’t know someone without understanding their families, too.”
Penemue tilted his head before letting out a rip-roaring laugh that bubbled up from his gut. “I see what you are doing. You have found the loophole in my promise to you. A loophole that will keep us speaking forever.”
“Well, as you saw with my mother, her last hope for me was to live well. You’re not going to deny a dying woman her last wish, are you? I think we should head back to Paradise Lot and spent the next fifty or so years going through everything. Sound good?”
I heard a chuckle from behind me as Bella tried to hold back a laugh.
“Clever human,” Penemue said with genuine mirth on his lips.
“All this time, you Others would obfuscate the point, bend the rules, do my head in. Especially you.” I tried to smile when I said that, but it just wouldn’t come. But I wasn’t trying to be funny; I loved the big lug, and that was all I felt. “I learned from the best,” I finally said.
“So did I. And what I learned from you, my friend, is that some rules are meant to be broken. After all, you have reminded me time and time again that the gods are gone. The rules matter less now. And so I fear I shall break this rule—break my promise to you.” Penemue ripped the rift wider now. “Thank you, but it is time for you to go.”
“But we’re not done,” I said, seeing what he meant to do.
“Yes, we are.”
“Your promise,” I said with desperation.
“Human Jean-Luc Matthias, you of all people know that you cannot win them all.” He turned to Bella. “I do take comfort in one thing: he has you again, and I did that. Perhaps the one good thing I’ve done in my life was returning you to him. I am so happy for that one promise I did not break.”
As he spoke, an invisible force started pushing us out through the portal. From where we stood, I could see where he meant to drop us off: back at the Millennium Hotel … back at the … “What the fuck is he doing?” I cried out.
↔
Instead of the serene, peaceful entrance of my hotel, I saw Marc standing in the hull of the Apache helicopter with smoke bellowing out the barrels of the warbird’s chain gun.
Several dead, doglike creatures—hellhounds—littered my front lawn. Dead hellhounds and a—
“A dead woman?” I yelled at him. “You killed someone? At my hotel?”
My cries woke Marc from whatever stupor he’d been in, because he looked up at me and said, “Jean? What are you … No, where are you?”
“Leaving one hell just to enter another,” I
said, and it was then I noticed that Bella and I were still standing in Penemue’s inferno. The twice-fallen was no longer pushing us out; he had stopped, and looking over at him, I realized that the angel was distracted by the same scene that I was. He also stared at the chaos in befuddlement.
But confusion wasn’t all that painted his face. There was something more—something more visceral than simple What the fuckedness on his face. There was also remorse, and that’s when I followed his gaze and saw a very frightened EightBall standing on the lawn.
Behind him stood an elven woman who I don’t even think he noticed. She stared at the strange scene unfolding, but unlike EightBall, there was no fear in her eyes. Just bewilderment.
The young boy of nineteen first looked at Penemue, then past the angel to the house scene behind him. EightBall furrowed his brow, first in confusion, then recognition as he realized what—or rather, who—he was staring at.
“Mom?”
Like Bats Out of Hell
As soon as EightBall spoke, that strange elven woman lifted her hand like she was greeting us.
Which, as it turned out, was the least friendly greeting ever.
Penemue, Bella and I were thrown back and through the wall of EightBall’s childhood living room. But instead of hitting the wall like normal people—and a normal angel, I guess—we crashed through it and were back in the void.
As we tumbled helplessly through the blackness, I could see Penemue’s islands of creation around us. In front of us (and what we were tumbling away from) was the apartment building and the oak tree outside it. To our left was the mountain where Mr. Penemue’s classroom-of-the-gods stood. Above us, the library full of book worms.
I guessed that when Penemue created the various layers of Hell to torture himself with, he didn’t bother filling up the in-between parts.