Futile Efforts

by Piccirilli, Tom

  Doing a little dance, the way he used to do when he wanted to be fed pork belly leftovers, Gomez stood on his hind legs. "Yes. That's what we've been discussing."

  "Why've you come in the form of my dead dog, Raphael?"

  "It is the will of the Lord, and I do not challenge it."

  Wynne went for the bottle again and saw that people were floating past his window, smiling with arms raised, a new luminescence to their flesh.

  They were becoming golden, as if touched by a molten blanketing of the sun, before it had turned to a sackcloth of ashes. Some giggled, some were praying quietly, others singing songs that sounded like hymns Wynne had never heard before. He let out a whimper of reverence. The sky grew heavy with bodies and still they continued to rise into the clouds and beyond.

  His door shook as blows struck it, the blood so thick under the door that it was actually lapping, gurgling. Sobbing shrieks, cries, and pleading whines reverberated down the corridors of the building. They were up on the roof jumping, trying to fly.

  "What's happening out there?"

  "The damned are being taken to hell. Others are joining Satan's hordes."

  "That sounded like Mrs. Rhyerson."

  "It is."

  "The nice old lady in 3C? She volunteers at hospitals. Food shelters."

  Gomez let out a sigh as ancient as creation, full of endless disappointment. "She murdered her husband and newborn son almost sixty years ago. She never felt remorse in her heart, and so she cannot be forgiven."

  Archangel Raphael, inside the body of a dog buried in Central Park three days ago, turned those fiery eyes on him, and inside them Wynne saw no absolution or rescue. But neither did he sense hatred or anger. Only a vague puzzlement.

  "So why am I still sitting here talking to you?" Wynne asked. "Why aren't I being sent to hell, or branded with the mark of the Beast, or rising to paradise?" He could still remember some of his Sunday School teachings, back when he sat in front of the nuns and trembled before the paintings and statues showing agony.

  "You pose a problem for God," Gomez said.

  "Me?" You knew you'd caused plenty of troubles for a lot of people, but for the Creator of everything?

  "You and those like you."

  "Who are those like me?"

  "The insane."

  "What have you got against us?"

  "On a personal level, nothing," the Archangel admitted. "But you must prove yourself worthy of salvation."

  Wynne thought he understood. A madman wasn't accountable for his evil actions. But neither was he responsible for the good that he did, the joy and love he felt in his heart. God couldn't condemn him, but neither was he considered saved.

  "So what now? Purgatory?" That could be worse than hell as the years stacked up over all eternity. A place without substance, feeling, or meaning. "Oblivion?"

  "That's up to you," Gomez said. "From this point on, you make choices in your right mind."

  That stopped him. "I'm not crazy anymore?"

  "No, I healed you. A moment ago."

  Wynne didn't feel any different. The same delirium and regrets and guilts threatened to overtake him. His mind seemed just as volatile and blaring and crammed full of nonsense as ever.

  "Now," Archangel Rafael, one of the seven who stand before the throne of God, patron saint of warriors and assassins, the dying and the damned, within the body of Gomez the dead Chihuahua, said. "Go out there and battle some hellspawn."

  It almost got Wynne laughing. You're put into the most deranged situation you've ever been in and told that you're no longer nuts. Just when you needed it they yanked it away.

  "How?" he asked.

  Faces went by in the window, some of them scared as they were reeled to heaven. The dog hopped up onto the kitchen chair and from there jumped to the sink. With his teeth, he picked up a dirty plastic knife and fork set that Wynne had used to eat Chinese takeout with three or four nights ago. Gomez made a face and pointed his snout.

  Scowling, Wynne stepped over and took the plastic cutlery from the dog's mouth. He looked around the kitchen counter but couldn't even find a steak knife. He wasn't sure if he owned a real piece of silverware anymore, and the thought suddenly made him sad. Was that clarity or merely self-pity?

  Gomez said, "Here are your weapons. When you need them, they shall transform into burning swords."

  "You certain I'm not nuts anymore?" The fork was cracked and missing a tine. He thought the Lord could've started him off with a touch more oomph than this. "All things being equal, I still feel a little unhinged."

  "It's like that when you serve the path of righteousness. Satan's minions are everywhere and your duty as a soldier of light is to slay them where you find them. Go with God and do virtuous deeds in His name."

  It sounded easy enough. He'd done some fairly ridiculous shit in his life up to this point, and he figured this wasn't going to be much different, considering.

  One bad time, he'd seen the face of his father pressing forward from the spines of all the books on a street vendor's table down on 59th and Fifth. There he was, hugging books, crying for daddy, while the tourists took photos of him and the cops dragged him down to lock-up. Eventually, he was put on a new medication that made him think he was talking to time-traveling puppets in the shower, and it turned his piss blue.

  All in all, he was looking forward to discovering if he had what it took to fight on the side of angels.

  Wynne had to step into blood to get out his door. The hallway was littered with the dying and the dead, most of them pressed to the edges of the hall as if someone had cleaned up the bodies, stacking them beside one another. He counted seven people, but couldn't be sure who it was he heard groaning.

  He knelt near Mrs. Rhyerson. Her dress was torn, eyes still wide and full of dread. He whispered her name and touched her cold face. Wynne's stomach churned with doubt. The wounds in her chest looked like they could've been made with kitchen utensils.

  Had he finally gone off the big edge and run rampant through the building? Was he already in a padded cell, or heading for one in the back of a police van? Five years ago he'd been given shock therapy. It was much more civilized than you see in movies, the rubber wedge jammed in your mouth, the giant electrodes burning the flesh at your temples, your body flopping and snapping wildly on the steel bed. It was sophisticated and the juice sort of relaxed him, but instead of helping him back into his head, Wynne had hallucinated like a son of a bitch for three days.

  Now, the bodies–the mewling moans quickly ebbing and falling silent in the corridor, you had to wonder. This had the same structure of a drug-induced, electrified dream.

  He started down the stairs and turned up to look towards his apartment door one last time, hoping Gomez might be there, lending him courage, urging him on. But the doorway was empty except for the blood. Even the bodies were gone now.

  The silence surprised him. He walked down Columbus Avenue, sort of strutting, seeing how the city had emptied. There were still some floaters up there in the sky, but not so many anymore. God did fast work.

  Wynne hadn't even gone half a block before he saw half a dozen other ex-crazies slinking out onto the sidewalk. In this city, there had to be thousands of schizoids, paranoids, catatonics, spiraling obsessives, extreme bipolars, and dissociative identity and dementia praecox cases left. The homeless, the alcoholics, the borderliners who could function well and looked beautiful but behind closed doors acted out their lunatic drives.

  He didn't know if they'd been cured too, but they all walked past one other smiling, giving little waves. The others carried strange objects as well: tape dispensers, empty milk cartons, canisters of whip cream, model airplanes.

  "We don't make for much of an army," Wynne said.

  He'd seen demons earlier in the day, writhing in the subways, breaking loose. Like the angels hovering overhead they appeared to be more creatures of energy and radiance, form without much substance. No horns or cloven hooves, merely other beings th
at had a darkness and fury about them. Wynne couldn't sense any evil, but that rage pulled at him, drawing him to the east side.

  Wynne wandered downtown looking for some demons to slay. The streets were deserted but the stink of blood and bile kept growing worse. Heaven may have swept up the corpses, but it had left behind the fetid smell of fear, piss, and murder.

  What he took to be his own hate and pain lured him down to Greenwich Village, step by step.

  The only distinct difference he could feel now was one of intent. Instead of trying to fill his hollow days with booze and bitter poetry, he'd been given a reason to move into the world. A function to existence.

  Had that always been the only disparity between he and sane men? Could he have lived his life with a pittance of joy if only he'd found a goal early on when it would have mattered most?

  Almost without realizing it, Wynne came to a stop before a small secondhand bookshop near St. Mark's Place. He hadn't been here for some time, but years ago he'd spent most of his afternoons inside, perusing the tightly-packed shelves. Finding books that somehow drained the fury by offering him other worlds. Sometimes ones almost as nightmarish as his own, but not of his making. It salved him, for a while there.

  The old man, his name was McQuill.

  He sat on a high rattan stool behind the counter, surrounded by towering stacks of hardback books. Square-cut lenses in rimless glasses, eyes damp and black. The bald egg-shaped head squeezing free from the buttoned collar, neck muscles and veins standing out harshly like after a great exertion. McQuill grinned as Wynne walked further into the store.

  "Feels like stepping into your own anger, doesn't it?" the man asked.

  "Yes," Wynne admitted.

  "Like returning home?"

  "To a home I despised."

  "You're not so different now."

  "I know," Wynne said.

  Old man McQuill wasn't quite McQuill anymore. There was an enormity to him now the same way as there had been in Gomez. An eternal and immense nature seeping through such a small bogus frame.

  All you could do was play it as cool as you possibly could.

  Wynne tightened his grip on the plastic fork and knife and stepped to the counter. The old man inspected him in an offhand way, constantly glancing about place as if seeing something Wynne could not. It was oddly unsettling, and reminded him of the schiz cases on back on the ward who would look through you like they could see the atomic structure making up your molecular chains.

  "Who are you?" Wynne asked.

  McQuill finally focused on Wynne, and showed his teeth. They were yellow and square and set in a smile that displayed only malice. Wynne found it comforting because the rancor was so understandable, so human in nature. He'd seen that leer on bullies and know-it-alls his entire life.

  "I'm Belial," the old man said.

  "Why are you in Mr. McQuill's body?"

  "It is the will of the Lord, and I do not challenge it."

  Wynne drew his chin back and frowned. "I thought that was the whole point of being a fallen angel."

  "You know nothing of truth."

  That gave him some pause. If truth was beauty, and he'd been blinded to beauty by the depths of his anguish, had he also been blinded to truth?

  The world around him, despite the death and angels and demons, still seemed very much the same.

  He started to ask another question when Belial cut him off. "I'm a Grand Duke of the Infernal Order, second Seraphim following Lucifer, soft in voice but full of treachery and lies." He hesitated as if expecting awe.

  Wynne said, "You guys and these self-serving names."

  "Commander of eighty legions of hell. Dedicated to wickedness, sexual perversions, fornication, and guilt."

  "Well then, you're definitely the guy I've been looking for," Wynne said, thinking back on the reams of paperwork in his files explaining why he couldn't have a normal relationship with a woman. "You prick."

  "What is it you wish?"

  "I'm supposed to slay you." Wynne held up the plastic cutlery thinking…Hey, this would be a pretty good time for these to turn into burning swords here.

  "Why?"

  "So I can get into heaven."

  "Oh," Belial said. "I should've realized. You're one of the loonies left behind because you can't tell the difference between right and wrong."

  "So they say. Except I'm supposed to be cured now."

  "Do you feel better?"

  "Honestly, no."

  "If you were sane would you really be holding a plastic knife and fork and looking to kill a bookstore owner inhabited by a Grand Duke of Hell?"

  Wynne shrugged. He was having a tough time figuring out where to draw the line between sick in the head and weary of soul. Maybe when it came down to it, there was no difference at all.

  McQuill sat up a little straighter on the high rattan stool. The grin grew even uglier and he leaned forward the way the nuns would do it when you were in the shitter and didn't know the correct chapter, the right verse. "Maybe you only exist in some bedtime story that God is reading to baby Jesus inside the manger."

  "If you're saying I might not exist at all, the fact that you're arguing with me implies that you also aren't here." He tried to think of how the Jesuits would phrase it. "That being the case, your logical imperative is no more stable than my own."

  "What does that mean?"

  "I'm not sure, Belial, but it somehow makes sense to me anyway."

  "That's because you're still crazy!"

  One of the reasons Wynne had never done well in group therapy was because nutjobs could always break everything down into circular logic and just go around and around in a loop forever. They never cared if they ever got to the end of the race so long as they got to stay on the track.

  Is that the way Heaven and Hell worked? Each side trapped in its own circular logic and never even getting close to being a part of the same argument?

  You could only take so much and wait so long before you had to jump, one way or the other. There was no such thing as inertia. The world spun around and moved you anyway, no matter how hard you tried to fight. If anything, the Day of Judgment proved that much. Even if you just sat around in your sweat pants drinking rum, your dead dog would stand up and get your ass back in gear.

  "You don't hate me," McQuill said. "Why should you kill me?"

  "I hate what you represent."

  "And what's that?"

  "My own pain."

  "Then you admit we are a part of one another."

  "I admit that the worst of what you are is the same as the worst of what I am. I'm disgusted by it, and I can sense that you embrace it." He held the plastic fork with the missing tine out in front of him, hoping that Belial would cower before the glory and might of valor and virtue.

  Except nothing happened. Wynne kind of jutted the plasticware forward.

  "What are you doing?"

  "They're supposed to transform into burning swords."

  "When?"

  "I don't know."

  "You look kind of silly, if you don't mind me saying," Belial, second Seraphim following Lucifer, soft in voice but full of treachery and lies, told him.

  Wynne didn't, really, because he knew it was true.

  The old man lifted his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. When he turned his gaze back on Wynne, you could see the ages of despair and misery within him, even something like confusion. It reminded Wynne of just about every psychiatrist, counselor, analyst, aromatherapist, herbal healer, professional colon cleaner (he'd been to two), and holistic practitioner that Wynne had ever met. They all gave him that same sorrowful look.

  "Do you want to know what hell is?" Belial asked.

  "No," Wynne answered. He already knew.

  Hell is when you're four years old and you're playing with your puppy out on the front lawn. You love the dog more than anything, more than you'll ever be capable of loving anything else, as it pounces and flounces over your legs, and you're laughing louder than yo
u ever have or will again in your sick life. Dad's on the porch watching over you, but he's put in forty hours of overtime and he's nodding off with a beer in one hand and the paper open in his lap. The dog, it's running around in a big circle, tripping over the flagstone path leading up to the house. There are dandelions growing between the rocks, waving in the wind, and the puppy moves to one, then the next, then the next down the walkway towards the road.

  You're calling the dog back to you but it just keeps prancing closer to the curb, and then it's in the street. You get to your feet and you start to move, a half-choked cry unable to escape your throat, and you rush a little faster, still faster as the dog sets off to run across the road. A car is coming.

  Some teens in trashed '73 Mustang needing a lot of body work, but the engine's tuned fine. You watch your puppy traipsing along, tail wagging wildly, until it's in the middle of the road. The Mustang bearing down, the engine screaming now as the bastard behind the wheel stomps the gas and tugs the car left, the slightest squeal to the tires as you rush forward with your eyes wide and your mouth wide and your hands wide open, raised above your head as if angels will set down in your palms, and the dog you love so much barks once, calling for you, and the fucking Mustang...the goddamn Mustang...

  ...it misses.

  You love.

  Oh Christ how you can love, but there's a piece of hell inside you that wants to witness the destruction of all you hold dear and sacred. Even then, at the age of four, you realize that this is what's inside you. It's always been there, and will forever be.

  I.

  You.

  You are hell.

  I am Hell, Wynne understood.

  And in his hands were two burning swords. Belial actually let out a little laugh of satisfaction, like he was happy that Wynne realized the truth of the matter. Crazy or sane, you couldn't get away from the fact that wherever you went, you brought hell with you locked up within yourself. The old man showed his teeth again and sort of bounced off his stool, clambering over the counter and trying to stage dive.

  The weapons of flame raised in his hands, Wynne held his ground and felt McQuill impale himself upon them.

  As if this moment had been well-choreographed and practiced many times before, Wynne found his leverage and thrust forward, driving the fiery blades into Belial's heart, listening to the final mutters and resentful laughter of the old man. His flesh vanished in a few seconds, stripped away by the cold light of the swords.