Hell Can Wait

by Theodore Judson

  “Thanks,” said the blond man and gaped, ill at ease, upon the Roman’s facial scars.

  “You are most welcome, citizen,” said Maternus.

  “Right…” said the man. “Are you an immigrant, pal?”

  “I am Matthew August,” said Maternus. “I come from the beautiful place known as Montana. I have served with the army in Mesopotamia, among other locations.”

  “I figured you had to have been a soldier or a boxer,” said the blond man, who dared to smile, but not for long. “Were you hurt bad — if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “How did you know?” said the Roman, and touched his face, exactly as he had done when he first spoke to the secretaries at the school.

  “You got, you know, some marks,” said the man in the dirty cap. “Was it shrapnel, brother?”

  “I was cut by metal,” said Maternus. “Perhaps you call it shrapnel.”

  An unanticipated moment of silence then ensued. The Roman soldier had not experienced a similar passage in his previous life; back then he had not known any of the subtle nuances that have come to form the bulk of modern human existence; officers back then had mostly barked orders at him, and he had barked them at his inferiors. When he had not been fighting, he and his mates had been drinking and whoring and shouting with all the power of their lungs inside the filthiest buildings in the half-civilized frontier towns to which the empire had sent them. His time in Hell had been more raging chaos. Now, standing toe to toe with a man he did not know and waiting for something to happen was entirely new to him. To Maternus the events that seemed closest to this moment were the many times he and his comrades had stood silently in their ranks, waiting for the centurions to give the command to attack, a time when Maternus had heard the other soldiers whisper a final prayer to their sundry gods.

  “My name’s Stephen Kent,” said the blond man and stuck out his hand.

  The Roman had seen Mr. Hamburg and other respectable people do this, and knew it was another type of greeting, a more heartfelt type than the open-handed waving gesture he had witnessed on his first day in Aurora. He took Stephen Kent’s hand and squeezed it vigorously.

  “Whoa, cowboy,” said Mr. Kent and quickly extracted his hand from Maternus’s iron grip. “Just shaking with you, brother. I didn’t want to fight.”

  “I am most apologetic,” said the Roman. “I would not offend you.”

  Stephen Kent shook his hand to get the feeling back into it and at the same time braved making another smile at the stolid Roman, one Maternus thankfully returned.

  “I am the night janitor at Susan B. Anthony Middle School,” said the soldier, and expected Mr. Kent to tell him what he did to earn his bread.

  “I’m … I’m, like you say, a citizen,” said Stephen, sounding slightly uncertain as to what his occupation was exactly. Maternus took his response to mean he was a man of leisure, one freed by wealth from the burden of work.

  “I have many times seen you writing,” said the Roman.

  “Yeah, yeah, I do that,” agreed Stephen. “Right now I’m trying to get the bastards to stop letting those little sons of bitches on their motorized skateboards use the biking trails. Not that it’s those little, evil shits I’m angry at — they couldn’t have thought of this on their own. You can be goddamned, shit for certain sure of that! It’s the companies, the advertisers, and everybody else unwilling to give the rest of us a moment’s peace. They’ve got the city in the palm of their hands! Who else could it be?! The same people that teach the kids how to smoke and then how to ride those scooters and those miniature motorbikes, and by the time they’re nineteen, the kids are riding down the street in gas guzzlers smoking fucking cigars from the fucking Dominican Republic.”

  Blessed with his new knowledge of English, Maternus at once realized Stephen was using improper language. Ever mindful of Mr. Worthy’s admonition not to lose his temper, the Roman was equally aware that here was a man whose temper was not only lost, it was running as wild as a riderless horse pursued by wasps pouring from a freshly broken nest. Stephen shook with rage when he spoke of motorized vehicles on bike paths, and, as little as the Roman knew of the modern world and its bicycle trails, he could see the man’s arguments sailed along unaided by the wind of logic. After a month of visiting the library, Maternus knew it was a place wherein one should be as quiet as possible, and he understood why a half dozen patrons at the long tables were glaring at Stephen.

  “Samuel Johnson told Mr. Boswell we should always be open to new friendships, Stephen,” said Maternus, “otherwise we will grow old alone. I would therefore enjoy a conversation with you, sir, but perhaps we should go outside and not bother our fellow citizens.”

  Many years had passed since anyone had hinted at becoming a friend to Mr. Kent; even those he lived among did not use the term ‘friendship’ to refer to the relationship they had with the unkempt and slightly deranged man. This former soldier from Montana had a face Stephen might see in an alcohol-induced nightmare, but he seemed nice, in the feeble-minded manner of being nice.

  “Sure. Just let me get my things. I’ll introduce you to Shen. He’s a roomer at our house,” said Stephen, and put the journals that had offended him back on their rack, then led Maternus to the table where his black friend remained seated, happily scribbling away on the copy paper he kept inside a three-ring notebook.

  “Hey, man,” Stephen said to his friend, “I’m stepping outside to have a smoke and talk to my man Matt here. He was a soldier they sent over to the Middle East. Got torn up over there. Bet he’s got some stories worth hearing.”

  Two men could not have behaved more differently than did the dowdy and ebullient Stephen and his unruffled black friend. Without a sound, the younger man floated up from his chair, and making only a faint, cold smile to signal his intentions, he placed a cool-as-a-freshly-caught-trout hand on the Roman’s calloused paw and slipped it off again without attempting to shake Maternus’s hand. He took an artful breath, and paused before he expended the air he had taken into his lungs by wasting it on a word. He was very odd to Maternus’s way of thinking, yet the black man looked very elegant doing the odd things he did.

  “I could use some fresh air,” Shen said to Stephen and gathered up his notebooks. “Did you tell Cecilia about my reading?”

  “No, no, didn’t get around to it,” confessed Stephen, who became agitated at the mention of the woman’s name and absentmindedly bounced a fist against his thigh.

  “I’ll tell her on the way out,” said Shen, and he led the group toward the front desk and the main entryway beyond it.

  Behind the long counter that afternoon was a slight, gray woman Maternus had spotted on previous visits to the library. He remembered her because she had peculiar spectacles attached to a chain she wore about her neck. At forty-eight, Cecilia Roberts remained a strikingly handsome woman; she had been even better looking in the years before she started wearing formless corduroy jumpers and those unfortunate spectacles, and no one was more conscious of the changes time had wrought than was Cecilia herself. Eighteen centuries in the undisturbed darkness of Hades had not been enough time to make the Roman misunderstand the silly grin Steven made when they approached the woman. He also knew why Cecilia sighed softly when she saw the graceful Shen drawing near.

  “Just wanted to tell you, C, I’ll be reading at the Great Blue Heron tomorrow night,” said Shen casually, although the adverb casually could be attached to everything Maternus has thus far seen Shen say or do.

  “I know,” said Cecilia and touched her hair exactly as the young girls did when they spoke to Shen. “My girlfriends and I wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Did you see my letter in the Boulder Camera?” asked Stephen.

  Cecilia kept her pale blue, yearning eyes on Shen and did not acknowledge that Steven had spoken.

  “I’ll be doing several new works from my “Harvest Cycle,”” said Shen.

  “I love the “Harvest Cycle,” enthused Cecilia and leaned forward on
the counter, in part because she did not know what to do with her hands. “My girlfriends and I loved your “Planting Time” poems, too.”

  “I put their feet to the fire on the legalized pot issue,” Stephen inserted into the conversation. Only Maternus heard him, and the Roman had no clue of what the disheveled man was speaking.

  “We start at eight,” continued Shen. “I won’t be on right away. The amateurs in the poetry community have to have their time on stage during the first round. You’ll have to wait through that.”

  “They always save the best for last,” agreed Cecilia.

  “I’ve been working all morning on the bike path issue,” chimed in Stephen.

  “I’ll see you and the gang tomorrow night then,” said Shen and strolled away as smoothly as a swallow sweeping over treetops.

  “I’ll be seeing you, too,” added Stephen, but Cecilia busied herself with some papers atop the counter and paid him no heed. Steven looked over his shoulder several times as he followed Shen, only to see that the librarian still did not glance at him.

  The three men exited the glass front doors and walked onto the concrete plaza, a several-acre space much beloved by teenage skateboarders, two of whom were taking daring jumps up the sloping curve connecting the vertical walls of the library with the gray, horizontal surface surrounding it. To stay out of the youngsters’ way, Maternus and his new friends jumped atop a ledge built around a knot of steel identified by a plaque as “New Dawn, New Prometheus,” which Stephen and Shen knew was a work of art and the Roman thought was a broken automobile.

  “You like this Cecilia woman, Steven Kent?” asked Maternus.

  “Her? She’s all right I guess, if you like the tall, skinny type,” said Stephen, feigning indifference.

  “I like Cecilia on a spiritual level,” said Shen, and he and Stephen lit up some sweet smelling cigarettes. (Shen had an intriguing way of holding his cigarette between his thumb and index finger. Maternus had never watched people smoke before, yet he could right away tell that Shen did it better than Stephen.) “Biologically, she is not my cup of tea,” added the poet.

  “Shen is a most unusual name in this language,” commented Maternus.

  “Short of Shengli, Mandarin Chinese for ‘victory,’” explained Shen. “Shengli Coleman is the name I put to my poems. My mother was Chinese. My father was African-American.”

  “You speak of them in the past tense,” noted Maternus. “Are they dead?”

  “Heavens no — they’re in Anaheim,” said Shen, surprising himself by accidentally saying something witty. “Wait a minute. I need to write this down,” he said and opened his notebook to scribble down the words he had just spoken.

  “Would you like a smoke?” asked Stephen and offered Maternus one of his cigarettes and a device Maternus did not know how to use. The Roman had seen anti-smoking messages on the walls of Susan B. Anthony Middle School and recognized this as a vice a man facing the possibility of eternal punishment should avoid.

  “Is tobacco not detrimental to one’s health, sir?” he asked.

  “We don’t use tobacco,” said Stephen.

  “Herbs, hand-picked from India,” said Shen and released a long, never-to-be-imitated streak of smoke. “Nature’s own — they can’t harm your lungs.”

  Maternus still declined their offer.

  “Tell us about the action you saw in the Middle East,” said Stephen.

  “I really don’t care for war stories,” said Shen. “War is usually too political. I’m an apolitical writer. I’m interested in the human side of things, including the individual human side. Do you have any human war stories to tell, friend?”

  “War is nothing but stories of humanity,” said Maternus. “They are stories of our suffering, and of our stupidity. What other stories can there be to tell?”

  “Did you ever kill anyone?” asked Shen.

  What an odd question! In the Roman’s day, if a soldier had served in the ranks and survived, anyone he spoke to would rightly presume he had killed those he met in battle or else the veteran would not have remained alive. Maternus had survived many pitched battles, and whenever the enemy had broken formation and fled the field, he and his comrades had killed at least several apiece during their headlong pursuits.

  “Yes, I slew many at close range,” he said and then repeated what the angel had told him. “Each killing diminished my soul. There is nothing more to say, nothing to add to the misery I have inflicted, except to say that now I regret what I did.”

  “I understand,” said Shen, who in fact did not, but could make himself believe he did. “What you’re expressing is part of the human experience, and the human part of me corresponds with all of that.”

  “I’ve never met a poet before,” said Maternus, and at once thought of the young German the demon Banewill had shown him hacking to bits on the video. “Could you read something for me?”

  Shen and Stephen had obviously heard this same request on previous occasions and were keen to give satisfaction. Stephen prepared Maternus for the grand experience by explaining to Maternus that Shen was the finest poet the Front Range had ever spawned. His explanation contained much gratuitous cursing in which he used the f-word as an expletive, a noun, a verb, and as both an adverbial and adjectival gerund. The Roman admired the disheveled man’s ability to express himself despite his limited vocabulary, and expected his poetic friend could show even more craft because he had the library’s nine thesauruses at his disposal. While Stephen was delivering his introduction, Shen closed his eyes and retreated deep within his consciousness to gather himself for the forthcoming effort. He drew a breath, and then another, slowing, finding a rhythm in the flowing and ebbing inside his lungs. He opened his eyes when he was ready, and the words came forth loud and furious into the still air of the library plaza.

  “Deaf to murmurs,

  Open wounds

  Slouch upon the land, as the sun is

  Coming up.”

  That was the whole of it. Maternus pondered asking if this was the title of the poem, rather than the poem itself. Shen did not go on, therefore the ancient soldier deduced this must be the entire work. Having recently read Horace’s Ars Poetica, in which the ancient master advises poets to hold their poems for at least six years, Maternus wondered if Shen had kept the poem until it came of age would his work have matured into something better. He decided this poem was a creature born horribly defective, and time could have only changed it into a larger creature before Shen released it upon the world.

  Because the angel had admonished him to be courteous to all human beings, rather than saying anything harsh, the Roman commented, “That was unique.”

  “That was fucking nothing,” said Stephen. “You should see him on stage at one of his poetry slams.”

  “I draw on the energy my audience grants me,” said Shen.

  “I work until eight or nine each night,” said Maternus. “I may not be able to come see you perform at… What was the name of the institution you mentioned to the Cecilia woman?”

  “The Great Blue Heron,” said Stephen. “It’s a coffee shop over on Buckingham Square, just off Mississippi Avenue. You can’t miss it. It’s got this big, fucking blue heron sign out front.”

  “The sign’s meant to be ironic,” said Shen, although Maternus had lived in modern America long enough to know ‘ironic’ was one of the meaningless words of which Mr. Worthy had spoken. “You should come after work,” said Shen. “There’s only about two dozen of us local poets who are serious about our craft. We each get up three or four times at every slam. I’ll be going till midnight, my promise. I’ll definitely be in the finals.”

  As they sat on the concrete ledge and conversed while the skateboarders whizzed past them again and again, Maternus learned that Shen and Stephen lived in the same house, an aged mansion owned by Stephen’s equally aged uncle Jerry, which meant they were both tenants of that elderly man. This Jerry was a pensioner. Both of Maternus’s new friends paid a s
mall monthly rent and performed services around the house for the old man, such as shoveling the walks in winter and mowing the lawn in summer. Stephen was also something of a cook. Shen seemed to scrape together a little money from his poetry readings, and Stephen, like his uncle, received a check from the government every month. When Maternus asked how one went about getting such a monthly payment, Stephen muttered something about “a disability due to prolonged drug use,” and said no more on the subject.

  “The letter-writing you do,” said Maternus to Stephen, “to whom do you direct your missives?”

  “To newspapers, magazines, whoever will print them,” said Stephen. “Really, they’re warnings to the world, to keep the train from going off the rail more than it already has.”

  “I do not grasp your meaning, sir,” said the Roman.

  “When the world starts going to hell, I mean going to hell worse than it normally does,” said Stephen, “I get to writing letters to the editor so people can be reminded of what normal is. You remember the Vietnam War?”

  Maternus had not yet read that far into world history and did not recognize that particular conflict, but he had learned the best way of maintaining a conversation with a modern person was to pretend he understood. He therefore gave a grunt of recognition.

  “Well,” said Stephen, “after I got Nixon out of office with my anti-Watergate letters, I wrote and wrote until we pulled completely out of there. Of course, there followed the killing fields of Cambodia and the re-education camps and what-not in the rest of southeastern Asia, which I’ll take the heat for. All very tragic and all. The important thing was, I got the war ended, and the healing process could begin.”

  Maternus understood less the more Stephen spoke. The Roman did comprehend this was obviously a very powerful man he had met, one capable of changing the behavior of his fellow citizens.

  “This bicycle path you mentioned…” began Maternus.