“Lesson one: Why ya need a metaphysical regimen. Firstly, there’s yer physical body, the material one ya left upstairs, consistin’ of calcium, carbon, water, and so on. It’s also known as ‘dinner’ if ya happen to be a worm.”
The pirate smiled and scanned the small group of boys around him, as if expecting hearty laughter. But, judging by the grave faces staring back at him, the humor of the situation was lost upon them. He clapped his dusty hands together.
“Movin’ right along, there’s yer etheric body, the energetic shadow of yer physical body. That’s what ya are now…etheric bodies. Without ’em, yer physical body just dissolves back into the elements from which it came.”
This was a lot of information, even for Milton. He could tell by the concerned expressions of his classmates that they were still hung up on the worm part. Milton raised his hand.
“Yes, dear,” Blackbeard said. “I mean, ya pathetic minnow.”
“Um, right,” replied Milton. “If this etheric body is so important, how come the scientists on the Surface haven’t found it?”
Blackbeard tilted his head back and laughed until the gash in his neck opened wide. His mirth abruptly ceased, though its trail seeped out a bit from his exposed throat. He set his head straight and continued.
“Yer physical body is made up of trillions of wee atoms, but most of those atoms is nothin’ but empty space…or at least that’s what those pasty-faced, land-lubbing smarty-britches upstairs think! In those trillions o’ teensy pockets is where yer etheric body lives, or lived, anyway. That’s why ya still look like ya did, because yer arranged the same way, only it’s just yer energy, not yer flesh suit.”
A bucktoothed boy tentatively raised his hand.
“About the worms…,” he squeaked.
Exasperated, Blackbeard rolled his eyes.
“Aye, enough already of the worms…I’m sorry I ever brought up the worms! The point is, yer still mostly who ya were. And while that’s comfortin’ and all, it doesn’t mean ya can loaf belowdecks all day. Ya got to keep yer etheric body in shape, or else it’ll stretch apart.”
“Stretch?” Milton said.
“Looks like we’ve got a parrot in the audience!” Blackbeard bellowed heartily. “Wake up before I hang ya lot from the yardarm!!”
The boys looked fearfully around the gym for anything resembling either a yard or an arm.
“Yer all energy now, ya vermin. And energy can dissipate. And what happens when ya dissipate…?”
Milton began to answer, but the pirate had meant the question rhetorically.
“Ya fade away, that’s what ya do! So keep yerselves together, ya rottin’ cackle fruits…lit’rally! Hence me trimmin’ yer jibs ’bout a comprehensive metaphysical education routine!”
“So,” a boy with feathered blond hair asked, “when our…etheric bodies came down here, that’s why it hurt and stuff?”
“Good question, buccaneer.” Blackbeard grinned. “If I had a piece of eight, I’d fling it at yer girly mop! That searin’ tingle ya all felt was yer sentient body comin’ apart.”
How many bodies can one person have? thought Milton.
“Yer sentient body is the glue that keeps yer physical and etheric bodies hitched together tighter than a sailor’s knot. When ya die, the energy’s absorbed into the Transdimensional Power Grid as a kind o’ tax to help cover the expense of sortin’ ya lot out.”
Milton raised his hand again.
“Yes, ya candidate for a keelhaul!”
“Right…yes…I felt a weird, I don’t know, feeling. Like a bug being stared at through a big magnifying glass, only I was the bug, and the magnifying glass could see deep inside of me, in places I didn’t even know I had. It happened right after my sentient body fell apart. I saw bright lights and clouds, even heard some pretty music. Then, all of a sudden, I came down here.”
Blackbeard screwed up his already screwed-up face.
“That’s a load of bilgewater, son,” he replied in a breathy tone that caused the skin around his neck scar to wiggle. “Yer judged in an instant. Boom, done. No hitch about it. Certainly no heavenly glimpses as yer spinnin’. No knots on the rope o’ judgment. Ya must be imaginin’ things to ease yer guilt-logged conscience.”
“No, sir,” Milton replied. “I really…”
The pirate stormed off. Milton decided to keep his hatch closed about the weird conversation he heard in his head on the way down to Heck. He didn’t need to give Blackbeard another reason to hang him from the yardarm.
“Follow me, ya worthless chests of fool’s gold,” Blackbeard said quickly.
The boys dragged themselves toward a crude wooden structure: basically two ladders—side by side—with long planks nailed to the top, with most of each plank jutting out like twin diving boards. Below the boards were deep buckets of what looked like chewing tobacco spit.
Blackbeard’s chest swelled with pride.
“Welcome aboard Queen Anne’s Revenge,” he said with a grand sweep of his arm. “It’s a partial model of the forty-gun warship I, um…borrowed… from a French privateer.”
“Partial is right,” Virgil whispered to Milton.
“Sorry,” Blackbeard said, cupping his ear with his hand, “did ya say that ya wanna go first? Well, shiver me timbers, come on up, yer the next contestant on Walk the Plank!”
Virgil shuffled forward glumly to a chorus of wicked laughter.
“And don’t ferget yer parrot, ya tub o’ blubber!”
Milton sighed and joined his friend as he marched toward the planks. Virgil and Milton climbed their respective ladders.
“Now, crew,” Blackbeard continued, “walkin’ the plank is that rarest of exercises: one that is both toning and fun to watch! It helps tighten the etheric muscle shadows on yer legs and stern, and helps yer sense of balance, which is no pleasure cruise when yer body is cracklin’ with restless energy!”
Virgil and Milton stood atop their ladders, Virgil’s creaking under the strain.
“Step lively, lads. Up to the edge, now. Good, good.”
Milton toed the wooden precipice and looked down into the frothy brown maw of the bucket below.
“Now, ya bloated carcasses, hop up and down on the plank and wave yer arms like a mother gull protectin’ her squabs.”
Milton hopped and waved his arms, but under protest.
“Why do we have to wave our arms?” Milton asked, desperately attempting to maintain his balance.
“Why ya ask, Cap’n Question Mark? Well…mainly because it’s a right good laugh!”
The class exploded in contemptuous laughter. Virgil’s platform shook and wobbled as if under siege by an invisible storm.
“Now, I want ya to jump yerselves in the briny brink on the count o’ three…”
Milton gagged.
“One…two…”
The class bell tolled. Blackbeard’s face drooped down to his billowing once-white shirt.
Milton and Virgil stopped jumping and smiled at each other with relief.
“Aye, well I’ll be measured for me chains. Ya all have permission to go ashore…”
As Virgil tried to maneuver himself back down his ladder, he lost his balance. The rickety platform, with its twin planks and ladders, wobbled past the point of no return. The wooden structure toppled to the ground, knocking over the enormous buckets of lumpy, tarlike drool.
Milton and Virgil lay paralyzed in the warm, expanding puddle.
Their classmates got one last laugh before heading out into the hallway for the cafeterium and their afternoon snack.
Blackbeard stood over the miserable boys, who twitched in the pool of backwash.
“Well, blow me down!” he snickered. “Looks like the fates have run a rig on ya two!”
He did a merry little jig toward a closet in the corner, emerging with two mops and buckets. He skipped back, whistling, and then dropped the bundle in front of the two boys, still stunned on their backs.
“Once you’ve swabbed this sick off of me
floor, then ya two can…swab the deck!”
The pirate’s eyes glittered with delight. Milton rose cautiously, hoping to avoid contact with the remains of Blackbeard’s tobacco binge as much as possible.
“What deck?” Milton asked.
Blackbeard’s expression sagged like a sail in a sudden calm. “Er, I mean…” He straightened and coughed. “Ya two can swab the hallway. And swab it good! No lollygagging or hornswoggling, either! I want a floor as bright as the sunrise over the Caribbean, aye?”
“Yes, sir,” Virgil mumbled as he stood up, then quivered and quaked before slipping back down into the revolting spew.
Blackbeard stepped out for a nip of Nelson’s Folly, whatever that was. Milton just hoped it wasn’t a brand of chewing tobacco.
As Milton and Virgil finally emerged from the sludge, Virgil picked up a mop and, like a natural born deckhand, began swabbing.
“And to think,” he muttered, “I used to love playing pirates.”
The two boys swabbed in silence, until Virgil began to hum a familiar tune, occasionally breaking into song. “Up, up and away, my beautiful, my beautiful balloon…”
The desperately cheery music haunted Milton’s thoughts. A balloon…floating…up, up and away.
Treat this whole thing like an algebra problem, Milton reflected. X + y + z = escape. A balloon. But how? What were x, y, and z?
Then, after all of the variables wrestled with one another in Milton’s mind, he began to see a pattern. A chain of small events, arranged just so, floated to the top of his thoughts. If executed properly—and in the correct sequence—these variables, events, whatever, could lead to something…big. The details needed to be worked out, but Milton knew that he not only had an answer, he had the answer.
Milton grinned uncontrollably. His heart was filled with music.
Up, up and away, my beautiful, my beautiful balloon…
30·TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL
JUST WHEN SHE thought she understood Heck, something happened to make Marlo thoroughly lose her psychic balance.
“Well, I’ve got a hammer…”
Here she was in a white floor-length robe with ten other girls on a riser singing while an angel waved her baton in time with the music.
“…All over this land”
The angel, Ms. Von Trapp, grinned and clapped her creased, delicate hands together.
“Vunderbar! Vunderbar!” She beamed with a gleeful flap of her wings.
“Did she just say Wonderbra?” Lyon snickered to Bordeaux, who were both in the back row, totally not singing. Lyon noticed Marlo looking over at them.
“Yeah,” replied Bordeaux, “and it’s a wonder if Gotharella over there will ever need a bra!”
Marlo’s face flushed. She had dealt with Lyon and Bordeaux’s type before, on the Surface. Popular, cruel…Usually it was just a case of trading barbs before merging back into the shadows. But, down here, she was off her game.
Ms. Von Trapp glided across the floor to the riser. “Zat vas very good!” she said. “The flavors of your voices are blending beautifully, like crisp apple strudel! Now let us try something more fundamental…heavy on zee fun!”
The girls groaned as Ms. Von Trapp tuned her guitar and struggled to get the strap over her left wing.
“Here ve go, girls. Very simple.”
She cleared her throat and out came a voice as clear and pure as a lake of holy water.
“Do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do.”
The girls grudgingly joined voices. Marlo sang quietly to herself, though perhaps “sing” is overstating it a bit. Sounds came out of her mouth, but they were more like gnarled tangles of sonic barbed wire than melodies.
A pasty girl with jagged chunks cut off of her dark hair stopped singing.
“Hey,” the girl said groggily, stretching the word “hey” out until it was two syllables. “This is, like, that song from the movie. The movie with all the singing and Nazis, where the hills are alive.”
The other girls nodded to one another.
“Yeah,” said a squat girl with mangled orthodontia. “Doe, a deer…”
Half the girls were now singing “…a female deer…”
A small cloud drifted across Ms. Von Trapp’s sunny disposition.
“Now, girls, let us…”
“Ray, a drop…”
“Please…”
“…of golden sun…”
“QUIET, OR YOU’LL GET ZHA BUSINESS END OF MY BATON!”
The song was snuffed out like a candle. The girls were petrified.
Ms. Von Trapp was trembling, strangling the neck of her guitar. A lone white feather zigzagged down from her wings. She noted its passage with shame. The wrinkled angel closed her eyes and clasped her hands together in prayer. After a moment of perfect stillness, she wiped a gleaming tear from her cheek and composed herself.
“Girls…young ladies…,” she said contritely. “Entschuldigung. I must apologize for my outburst. I’m not used to being down here.”
She smoothed her immaculate robes.
“Perhaps ve take a break from zee singing. Do you schön Mädchens have any questions?”
Lyon raised her hand. “Yes,” she said tartly, “I don’t know who Sean Munchkin is, but I have a question: what is an angel doing here, anyway?”
Murmurs rippled through the choir of dead young women. The angel’s smile shone like a miniature sun. The girls collectively winced at its brilliance.
“It’s Title VII of zha Eternal Quality Unification Adherence Law, better known as EQUAL,” Ms. Von Trapp said. “It means zat representatives from various otherworldly dominions are allowed to enter other realms as missionaries, to ensure that every soul has a truly balanced supernatural education.”
Bordeaux’s already slack, lip-glossed mouth gaped wider.
“So, like, you’re here to, um…show us how good it is to be good or something?”
Ms. Von Trapp smiled affectionately. “Something like zhat, my little frau.”
Lyon put her hands where her hips should have been.
“You’re wasting your time,” she said with a sharp voice like a slap. “Being bad is fun. So pack up your stupid guitar, Sister Act, and fly back up to your boring old cloud.”
Throughout Lyon’s tirade, Ms. Von Trapp just grinned compassionately.
“Danke for your opinion, Miss Sheraton,” the angel replied with a glimmer of pity in her eyes. “It is true, I may indeed be vasting my time…”
The skin around her eyes crinkled as her smile spread wider across her face. Did she have surgery to shorten her cheek muscles? Marlo pondered.
“…but I have all zha time in zha world…and then some.”
Lyon looked at Bordeaux confused and subtly deflated.
“In any case,” Ms. Von Trapp continued while returning to her place behind the plywood lectern, “it is a nonissue as I have been…reassigned.”
Figures, Marlo thought. Whenever she encountered a halfway-decent teacher, they either ended up getting transferred, fired, or, in her ex-hippie art teacher’s case, quitting to tour with a rock band as their interpretive dancer.
“Now, before ve end our class,” Ms. Von Trapp said with a lump in her devout throat, “I vould like to teach you a little song that you might find useful ven facing some of the more…impressionable demons down here.”
The Austrian angel cleared her throat.
“Kum ba yah, my Lord, kum ba yah!
Kum ba yah, my Lord, kum ba yah!
Kum ba yah, my Lord, kum ba yah!
O Lord, kum ba yah!”
Slowly the girls—save gifted mouthers Lyon and Bordeaux—joined in. Marlo found the song oddly comforting, despite the fact that she either missed or fatally wounded every note.
The class bell tolled, and the girls filed off the riser to hang their robes on rusty hooks. Lyon and Bordeaux dropped their robes on the floor, assuming some faceless person would pick them up for them, as they always did.
“Auf wiedersehen, child
ren,” the angel said sweetly as the girls shuffled past her. “Remember: you cry a little and zen you wait for the sun to come out. It always does.”
“Ooh,” Lyon mocked, “and I forgot to pack my sunscreen before I died.”
Lyon and Bordeaux cackled as they entered the hallway. Marlo straggled behind, her head down so that no one would see her blotchy, tear-streaked face. That’s all she needed, she fumed: to have Lyon and Bordeaux see her in a moment of weakness.
Just outside the classroom, gently ruffling in front of her awful Birkenstocks, was a long, perfectly white feather. The sight of it filled Marlo with quiet cheer. She picked it up and rushed back to Ms. Von Trapp’s classroom.
“Here,” she said as she burst through the door, “I thought you might want…”
But the room was empty. The only movement came from swirling dust motes that slowly settled to the ground.
There was an overpowering smell in the room: sweet, sour, and comforting. Like rose water, cedar, mothballs, and soap. It smelled like her Grandma Fauster. It was a smell she used to make fun of. But now, it made her feel safe and hopeful. It was the smell of an angel.
Marlo set the feather on the lectern and left the classroom. She sulked down the smoky hallway on her way to the cafeterium. Suddenly it dawned on her: she had found something and not pocketed it. And an angel’s feather at that. What a score! But the thought of keeping it hadn’t even occurred to her. What was happening to her? Being dead she could deal with, but not knowing who she was anymore, that was something else.
31 · LIVER LET DIE
MILTON SNEAKED INTO the empty cafeterium and leaned his mop against an Automat machine. He had never had any strong feelings regarding mops before. But after spending what felt like hours swabbing—yet was probably “no time at all” in this irritating place—he had developed a strong animosity toward this otherwise useful cleaning tool.
Luckily for Milton, Blackbeard had “hit the head,” whatever that was. He was just glad that, if a head was to be hit, it wasn’t going to be his.
Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go Page 13