And then Babylon, in that voice of hers, said: “Care to spice it up a bit?”
Oh no, I thought. I should’ve seen something coming with her inviting the Four Horsemen.
The other players said nothing but inclined their heads.
“You, my friends, belong to Judgment Day—that much is clear. Your purpose is no mystery. What if these—” Babylon picked up a handful of orange rocks from her mound of chips—“were souls?”
For the first time, I heard Death chuckle. The chilling sound buried itself, malignant and sly, under the booming laughter of War and the hacking chuckles of Famine and Pestilence.
“Little girl,” said War, eyeing Babylon in a way that was certainly not consistent with his chosen epithet for her, “you should know better than that.”
“Perhaps I do,” sighed Babylon, “but you know me. I live for the rush.”
“Have we a little rebel here?” said Pestilence. “In that case, all of our piles would go to Death—he is, after all, the final chapter.”
“Of course,” Babylon purred without blinking. “Sefer, send yours here, would you?”
I laid my fingers on her arm. “Babylon,” I said, “I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“What do I have to lose?” she asked, eyes aglow.
“That is a good question,” crept the voice of Death from under his faceless pale hood. “What have you? Perhaps indeed, your story does belong to the End of Days, but you know not how. What do you have but your own soul, poor excuse for one though it may be?”
“It’s like you said. I have my soul,” said Babylon.
“Babylon. Don’t bargain with Death,” I hissed. I gripped her arm hard now.
“The bookworm is right, girlie,” said War, stroking her hair. “That’s rather not a good idea.”
“I have to have a bad idea every once in a while. I have an eternity full of years. Our chips—” and here she flicked a few of the ones in her pile—“can be years. However many end in your pile are the years I spend in Hell. But the ones that end in my pile are souls saved. Ones you don’t get.”
“Babylon! That’s not something you screw around with!” I hissed at her.
“You talk as if you and I, and not God, are the ones with the power to decide who of those on Earth live or die,” Death said.
“I have never conferenced with God,” Babylon said. “Ask Him, when you get the chance—if I win. If I lose, it doesn’t matter, does it?”
Death is made of chance and risks and other things that screw people over. So of course we could feel the grin emerging from under his faceless hood as he said, “Consider it done.”
There was no reason to put a limit on the rounds they could play; we had forever to watch them whittle away back and forth at one another’s piles. Finally, it came to Babylon’s last stone.
When she slid it gravely to the middle, Death said, “Are you sure? These others are all just years. That one is an eternity.”
“Everything is an eternity in one way or another,” she said.
I would have laughed at her if I wasn’t so terrified—how terrible her attempts at mysterious aphorisms became, the more distressed she was pretending not to be. No one else bought it, either; no one thought her some wicked, witchy thing with a trick up her long, black sleeve. She was done for and all of us knew it—me, the Beast with his quivering haunches as he leaned over us all with his foul breaths, the silent and subdued War and Famine and Pestilence, and especially Death, who faced his victory with laudable grace.
She could’ve tried to bluff, but there’s no fooling Death. Instead they played their hands without words: Death, a full house; Babylon, ace-high.
Death laughed then—his soul-rending, startling laugh, worming its way under the skin as maggots do—and, as he patted his pile of stones into a neat burial mound, he said, “I will do you this one kindness, to reward your boldness: this game will remain just that.”
I breathed an audible sigh of relief. Babylon looked at me, grinned with a faint, condescending delight, the kind of look someone would give to a helpless animal fetching a stick. She pressed a peck to my forehead and squeezed me in a one-armed hug. “So concerned, you are,” she laughed.
Then she said to Death: “Your kindness would be kind, if it changed anything.”
Before any of the Four could craft a response, Babylon rose to her feet in one slick movement and with her rose the Beast, cool and composed now as if he had never been worried in the first place. “I really must go, unfortunately. Places to be, and all that,” she said.
She clambered atop her companion and they broke off at a run, the kind of breakneck ride they always took when Babylon was in a mood.
“Sore loser, that one,” murmured Pestilence.
“Death,” I said. The darkness inside his pale robe turned to me. “Is it true, what she said? That it doesn’t change anything? That she’s—”
“Oh, Sefer,” said Death. “I think you know.”
Six
Babylon and I could only stomach so many millennia of quiet paradise (even with our own little social intrigues and metaphorical battles), so when we got particularly miserable of being stuck in so picturesque a place, we wandered to the part of the sky where the Earth reached up for the Eden it had lost: a faded window that showed us the mortal world.
The window had no rhyme or reason. It didn’t project chronologically and it almost never showed what we wished it would—whatever that was. We knew so little about the mortal world; it was nearly impossible to wonder at what we should want to see.
Little as we ever wanted to admit it, we were jealous of the mortals. They grew; they changed; they had joy and grief, fury and fervor, plotlines to their lives while ours, in the garden, were always static, always the same, always waiting for the Last Day. Theirs were the stories that occupied existence; we were only the heralds of its end, never meant to know what was in between.
They were God’s favorites, of course, though sometimes we didn’t know why. They did such strange things—wonderful and terrible and inexplicable things. They took in homeless kids and picketed funerals. They spent hours volunteering and hours murdering. They took dogs they’d nudged accidentally with cars to the vet or threw them in rings as bait. They kept secrets and spilled them, shoplifted and donated to charity, loved each other and hated each other. Every extraordinary aspect became ordinary when piled against the whole. I could almost see why He loved them so much.
And Babylon loved them like she loved nothing else; she picked the strangest to love. Only the extremes, only the outcasts, only the spectacularly greedy and life-lusty and impossible and charming and hurtful ones. The ones who made life complicated for all the others. It didn’t come as a surprise.
We lived in this garden where it sometimes seemed impossible to sin with any seriousness, for lack of opportunity. So while we were not the best judges of evil, both of us knew that Babylon’s favorites were the corrupt and the damned. When their names tumbled off the lips of the people who loved them, who cried to see them fallen so far, I checked for them in my skin cells, in the walls of my stomach and behind my ears. Their names were never there. Somehow I always knew she’d pick the awful ones, just as she’d bonded her soul to the Beast.
She watched a husband lie to his wife about his cheating as his wife lied back to him about where the money from her father’s estate had gone. We barely knew the meaning of these words, their gravity; Babylon watched, enraptured, in love. She watched barely-grown mortals climb into the backs of cars and do things that would make the Bride faint if she could see them, and sighed dreamily. She saw merchants inch up their prices and acquire useless luxuries while their poor neighbors scraped by with less and less, and her eyes sparkled like the amethysts on their fingers.
“How can you possibly love them?” I asked her. We sat together, leaning back against the coarse hair of the contented Beast’s flank, looking up at the star-windows.
“Because it’s from them that the opportunity for goodness springs,” Babylon said. “What would be the point of saints and martyrs without them? Where can redemption come from if not them? The villain is just as important as the hero; and who will love them if I don’t?”
“God,” I answered.
Babylon shook her head. “His love is hard,” she said. “He loves them, maybe—that’s what we’ve always heard—but it’s tough love. Nobody can survive on bruising kisses alone. Don’t you think they deserve someone to love them, softly, and sympathetically? Doesn’t everyone?”
As if on cue, the portal above us flicked to a scene both grisly and not uncommon in its depravity—a terrible reality of Earth. A boy who could be no more than twelve led a girl who closely resembled him into a thicket of woods behind what must have been their own backyard and, all at once, closed his fingers around her throat and strangled her.
I swallowed hard. “Even him?” I asked.
“The sinners and the saints made him what he is,” Babylon said. “The saints and sinners both.”
“And God,” I said.
“And God.”
“If somebody ever does that to you,” I said, turning away from what the boy did to his sister’s corpse, “I hope you can keep that philosophy.”
Babylon didn’t look away. She never did. “We’re locked away up here, Sefer. Neither you nor I was ever meant to know sorrow. That’s for them. Only them.”
Again: this was my translation, not the New American’s.
I wished she had been right.
Seven
Happiness—because that was what it was, even if we didn’t know it—could only last so long. Judgment Day, always so far-off, came. All the symbols in Second Eden disappeared one by one, pulled aside by Michael and pushed through the tear in the sky to Earth. People—mortals—in white robes took their place. The hundred and forty-four thousand. More of them streamed in as each of my friends left. Only Jerusalem stayed with me in the garden, waiting for her wedding day, which of course would come later.
On the day that Michael came for Babylon, I still couldn’t find her name in my heart, or anywhere else on my body where letters overlapped to form a living being.
“Babylon,” he said, reaching for her hand, “your judgment has come.”
Only those will enter Heaven whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.
Judgment Day had come. After Babylon, the last, had gone, I would be unraveled into endless piles of letters and I knew none of them would contain her name. Today was the end of days. My secrets were secrets no more.
I caught her hand. “Babylon,” I whispered, “please don’t go.”
She just smiled at me, that incorrigible inimitable grin. The grin that had loved a thousand evil hearts, just because she could.
“This is what I’m meant for,” she told me. “I can’t be queen of our misfit garden forever, my Etz.”
I gave her the forbidden fruit. “Babylon, your name isn’t in me.”
Her expression didn’t change. “I know,” she said.
She’d always known. Of course.
She’d had to have known that she was wicked, that she was damned, in order to love the others of her kind.
“Babylon—”
“I’m not good, Sefer,” she told me. “Maybe not evil, but not good, either.”
“But I love you.”
“Every sinner on Earth is loved by someone,” she said, “some more righteous than others. And I’m lucky enough to have the Guest List of Heaven as my would-be redeemer.”
She leaned down to kiss me and her red hair stained my white robes.
“I love you, too,” she said. “Always have. Always will. But there are broken, lost, terrible, and totally unrepentant people down there—my kind.” A smile. “Someone needs to be their martyr. Someone needs to be the execution and the sacrifice, the harlot that births a bastard, a beautiful new world. And it’s me.”
“Babylon—”
“I’m their queen. I’m their final damnation. I’m what terrifies them all back up to you.” Babylon’s purple eyes flicked back to Jerusalem in her wedding gown, imperious, a few feet away, waiting to come into her own. “Do me one favor.”
“Anything.”
“Keep yanking on Jerusalem’s hair for me.”
Always.
She followed Michael to the window, and to her death.
My face was wet. I reached up to touch the first tears ever shed by a misfit like me—like us—and felt her name tingle in the damp on my fingertips. She had said that sorrow wasn’t meant for beings like us. She had been wrong.
Eternity
Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great …
She is a cage for every unclean spirit …
Her sins are piled up to the sky …
Mighty is the Lord God who judges her.
Smoke will rise from her forever and ever.
Fallen, fallen, Babylon the beautiful.
She was a cage for every unclean spirit, to shield them from the teeth of righteousness, because she was the only one crazy enough to think they deserved it.
Her sins are piled up to the sky, her love of everything that made virtues worthwhile.
Mighty is the Lord God who judges her, who never met her but who must have known her, too.
Smoke will rise from her, forever and ever, and the burning will always draw tears from my eyes.
Jerusalem waits another thousand years for her wedding day,
And as the ink-threads in me unravel, I make sure to pull her hair.
LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
mike hays
Isaiah 53: 3-5; New Jerusalem Version
3 He was despised, the lowest of men, a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering, one from whom, as it were, we averted our gaze, despised, for whom we had no regard.
4 Yet ours were the sufferings he was bearing, ours the sorrows he was carrying, while we thought of him as someone being punished and struck with affliction by God;
5 whereas he was being wounded for our rebellions, crushed because of our guilt; the punishment reconciling us fell on him, and we have been healed by his bruises.
LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
mike hays
I’ve found money, I’ve found food, and I’ve found myself in plenty of trouble on plenty of occasions, but I’ve never found another human being just lying around. That’s what happened when I found a person-shaped ball of olive drab and camouflage clothing—which would have been more at home in the reject pile down at the army surplus store—under our decrepit, worn sign for the, “Extraordinary League of Witch Assass_ _ _.”
It’s true. I found a boy about my age sleeping at the end of the Extraordinary League of Witch Assassins driveway. I was miserable at the time, covered in drying mud after falling into a flooded ditch. No, I’m not that clumsy. It’s those damn squirrels of Ms. Applewhite’s, the witch living across the ravine from us. Yes, we have a witch who is the closest neighbor to the Witch Assassins headquarters, but she’s a really nice lady. Professor McLemore, our ELWA leader and a Witch Hunter, First Class, has no clue she is a witch. Personally, I think he has a thing for her, kind of like an old-person crush. Ms. Applewhite lives in this cool, little cottage in the woods, and she has this army of squirrels hanging about who seem to think they’re her security force.
Those squirrels hate me. Seriously, they do not care for me in the least. They’re the reason I ended up covered in mud with a scraped forehead. I was walking down the driveway on a beautiful morning after a thunderstorm to check the mail and was attacked by a barrage of acorns from the tree branches above. I tried to evade my nut-flinging, furry-tailed attackers, but I stepped in mud, slipped down an embankment into a ditch, and used my forehead to stop myself against the trunk of an oak tree. The squirrels seemed to thoroughly enjoy their harassment of me and ran back to Ms. Applewhite’s side of the for
est. I hate those squirrels.
So there I was, heading to check the mail with a pounding headache. The mud was drying on my face, legs, and arms, increasing my misery ten-fold, as I approached the ELWA postal box.
Inside the box, I found several letters addressed to RESIDENT, plus two colorful fliers from chain stores, the electric bill, and the very magazine I’d been patiently waiting for—my first issue of Super Sport Network’s SSN the Magazine.
I stuffed the other pieces of mail in my shirt and carefully studied the colorful cover of the magazine before opening this highly-anticipated portal into the world of sports. One slow step at a time, I walked back to the driveway, entranced by a full-page spread photograph of a crouched surfer shooting through a tunnel of angry, foaming water. Something moved to my right, catching my eye.
That’s where I found the hunched figure splayed out against one of the signposts. I approached with extreme caution. Who knew? Maybe the curled up form was ready to pounce on me if I stepped too close. Two steps from the sign, an alarm sounded from the warning area of my brain. What if this was a dead body?
I froze in my tracks. Who wants to find a dead body when they’re holding their very first issue of their very favorite sports magazine in their hand and while covered in dried mud? Not me, that’s who.
Placing a hand on the sign for balance, I used the toe of my sneaker to push its back. Nothing.
Oh, no … Dead as a doornail, I thought, backing away a step and then squatting to get a better view. I poked the rolled up magazine at the body. The form shifted and grumbled. So it was alive after all. It grumbled a low moan reminiscent of the sounds I used to make when mom would try to wake me up. Then, just like I often did, the figure curled away and went back to sleep.
In the Beginning (Anthology) Page 6