So she missed the 5:03 and Klotsch took her to a nearby Chinese restaurant where the bartender mixed excellent zombies. Just as her mother always warned, Daphne was stuck paying the bar bill. But somehow, she didn’t mind.
Ms. Daphne Arabella Lipshutz (age: 28½; weight: 110 lbs., wears contact lenses) wedded Klotsch the following spring despite her mother’s protests that she surely could have found a nice Jewish goblin somewhere.
“And what about the children?” she shrilled. “Suppose they resemble their father?”
Daphne shrugged. “He’s not bad once you get used to him.”
With the combined aid of his wife and the New York State Department of Labor, Klotsch found work in an amusement park fun house, where he made such a hit that a talent scout caught his act and signed him up. Since then, the goblin has made several honor films, appears on tv talk shows (as guest host on one of them), endorses a brand of green toothpaste and is part owner of a line of Hallowe’en masks. The couple moved to the suburbs, where Mrs. Lipshutz often visits her illustrious son-in-law.
The only unfortunate result of their marriage is that it has worked wonders with Daphne’s complexion. But Klotsch is too considerate to mention his disappointment.
This is a lesson story. It doesn’t start out that way, and it doesn’t read that way. It doesn’t strike you until it’s over that George Effinger isn’t being funny-funny ha-ha in “Unfemo.” That’s because it is funny. Why, it’s as downright amusing as Hell can be.
It’s not that complicated, really. One of those mistake-in-transportation stories. We’ve seen them before. Poor schnook ends up in a place where he doesn’t belong and has to cope. I’ve written some myself. Inevitably, he or she ends up coping, and in the coping lies the story.
The central character in “Unferno” copes too. Methodically, bewilderingly, but he copes. Nothing so surprising about that, is there?
That’s what’s so shocking.
Unferno
GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER
Morton Rosenthal was a small, mousy man who, in another story, had murdered his wife and ground her into hamburger. We’d better get a good look at him here while he’s still vaguely connected to his earthly form; he’d just died, you see, and he was standing before a battered wooden desk, understandably dazed and bewildered. If they were still producing new episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” Morton Rosenthal would be played by John Fiedler. If you know who John Fiedler is, you have an immediate and rather complete image of Morton Rosenthal; if you don’t know, John Fiedler played one of Dr. Hartley’s patients on “The Bob Newhart Show,” the henpecked Mr. Peterson. But they’re not making “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” anymore, or that “Bob Newhart Show,” either, and Morton Rosenthal himself was dead, too. He hadn’t adjusted to it yet he had never been a brilliant person. For thirty-five years he’d been a butcher, a competent, honest, and hardworking butcher; but he’d been pretty much of a washout as a human being. He would have made a terrific porcupine, and he had the stuff to have been a truly first-rate weasel. But you get the idea.
“You got that?” asked the angel with the deep voice.
Rosenthal just blinked. The angel drummed his fingers on the desk, looking virtuous but as nearly impatient as an angel can look. “No,” said Rosenthal at last.
“Fill out the card. We got a whole crowd of people waiting behind you.”
“Sorry,” muttered Rosenthal. He really hated causing any inconvenience.
” ‘S all right,” said the angel. “Number thirty-four?” A fat black woman raised her hand timidly and walked slowly and painfully to the desk. Rosenthal looked at the card he held in one hand, the pencil he held in the other. He didn’t remember receiving either. He didn’t even remember coming here. He didn’t remember dying. His eyes opened wide. He was dead, really dead. “Oh, my God,” he said to himself. He knew what being dead meant; it meant that everyone who had ever lived would know every little humiliating thing about him. They were all waiting for him here, especially Rose, his USDA prime-cut wife. He was in for it now. His mouth got very dry and his ears started to ring. He had never felt so guilty in his life, and he knew that this was absolutely the worst place he could be to be guilty. They had their coldly methodical ways of adding up your score, he figured; and he sensed, too, that it was just about half an hour too late to try to get by on charm. He didn’t yet have any idea how closely this Afterlife matched the various versions he’d heard about or imagined on Earth, but it didn’t make much difference: there weren’t many of them that welcomed uxoricides with open arms.
The card. Rosenthal looked down at the card. The first question on it was: How long has it been since your last confession?
Talk about shocked! Rosenthal just stared at it uncomprehendingly. Slowly, like sewage backing up in the pipes of his old Brooklyn apartment, meaning attached itself to the separate letters, then to entire words, and at last to the question as a whole. They wanted to know how long it had been since he’d “been to confession.” Rosenthal knew he was really getting off on the wrong foot here, and there didn’t seem to be any way to make himself more acceptable. He went up to the desk and waited until the angel finished giving the same set of instructions to a freckled little Boy. The angel glanced up. “You’re not number forty-six, are you?”
“No,” admitted Rosenthal. “I was number thirty-three. You want to know how long it’s been since my last confession, and I’m not even Catholic.”
The angel sighed. “Sorry about that, mate,” he said. “Give me back that card, then go over to desk R. Tell the angel your name and she’ll punch you up on her terminal. Actually, you’ve saved yourself some time this way.”
“Is that good?” asked Rosenthal.
“Probably not,” said the angel.
“Look, I’m really sorry.” Rosenthal was now banking heavily on the forgiveness-and-mercy angle.
The angel smiled sadly. “You people always try that one. Well, we’ll see how sorry you can be. Go over to desk R.”
None of that sounded good to Rosenthal. He was about ready to throw up by the time he found desk R. There was a crowd there, too, and he took a number and waited. His feet and legs were getting tired. He didn’t know where he was, exactly it was like God’s equivalent of the Atlanta airport, where everybody had to go before they could go where they were supposed to go but they didn’t have chairs for the transients, only for the employees. There was no way to tell how long he’d been waiting, either. Nobody wanted to get into a conversation; everybody just stood around and stared at the ground or at the card or form he was holding. Everyone looked guilty. Everyone was guilty. So when his number was called, Rosenthal went quickly to the desk, faced an angel with green eyes, and put on a pleasant expression. His stomach was knotted tighter than when the IRS had called him in for audits. Rosenthal suspected that everyone here was in the same boat with him, so if he looked even a little more co-operative by comparison, it couldn’t hurt. He forced himself to smile. “Hello,” he said, “they sent me over here because I’m not a Catholic and “
“Name?” asked the angel.
“Rosenthal, Morton M.”
“M or N?” she asked.
“M,” said Rosenthal. “As in ‘Mary.’” He tried to smile winningly again.
“Your middle name is Mary?” she said dubiously.
“No,” said Rosenthal, feeling like he was trapped in a Kafka story, “my middle initial is M as in ‘Mary.’ My middle name is Mendel.”
“Social Security Number?”
It took some thought to remember it in this context, but he told her. “Just a moment,” said the angel, entering the data.
“The other angel said this would be quicker, but he didn’t explain what that meant. I mean, do you have to be Catholic to get into Heaven? That sounds a little, forgive me, unfair, if you know what I mean. I always thought if you just did your best, you know, lived a good life “
Suddenly, as Rosenthal’s luck would have it, there was a great upr
oar, a raising of voices in song and cheers, a tumult never heard on Earth, a celebration that gladdened the heart and elevated the spirit. Rosenthal turned to stare in wonder and glimpsed, far in the heavenly distance, what appeared to be troops of angels, legions of angels, great armies of angels marching, while all around yet more angels greeted them and welcomed them with an immeasurable outpouring of joy. The angel with the green eyes at desk R rose from her seat and put a hand to her throat. “My goodness,” she whispered.
“What is it?” asked Rosenthal. As they drew nearer, the columns of angels seemed ragged and dirty, their wings ruffled, their pennons torn, their lances bent. What place were they returning from, and what great battle had they fought? “What is it?” asked Rosenthal again.
“I’m not sure,” said the angel. She looked at him briefly, then back at the astonishing sight, then at her computer terminal. “I really want to join the jubilation, but my duty is to deal with you first.”
“I’m really sorry about that,” said Rosenthal. “I hope it won’t “
“Hey, mister,” said the angel in an outraged voice, “you don’t have to be Catholic to get into Heaven. You were just given the wrong card; but this says you murdered your wife! So what are you giving me a song-and-dance for?” She raised one angelic hand, slowly closing all the fingers but the index, and jabbed down at a button on her desk. “You go straight to Hell, buster,” she said, evidently glad to get rid of him.
Everything went black, and Rosenthal felt as if he were moving in every direction at once. There was a kind of loud, thunderish noise, like at the beginning of Finnegans Wake. He realized that now he’d probably never find out what was going on in Heaven just before he left; it hadn’t yet occurred to him that very soon he’d have more immediate problems to occupy his attention.
Well, not very soon. Travel-time Heaven to Hell, including recovery period, is nine days and nights (according to legend); that’s how long it takes for the first coherent thoughts to begin to work their way into the mind, thoughts of lost bliss and eternal pain. After Rosenthal had lain nine days and nights confounded, he began to get his senses back; it was like supernatural jet lag. Hell was hot; but, of course, that came as no surprise. He’d expected fire and brimstone, though he had no clear idea what brimstone was. He thought brimstone was a tool of some kind, maybe used in the hat business to flatten out brims. He thought brimstone was a kind of inconvenience, as in “she weighted him down like a brimstone around the neck.” As it turned out, he was wrong. Brimstone is an old word for sulfur and, when combined with fire, is very unpleasant to have to lie around in. Rosenthal climbed out of the fire and brimstone as soon as he could, and sat down on a hot rock to think and clear his head.
His first realization was that he was now naked. He hadn’t felt naked in Heaven; he’d simply been unaware. Now he was aware, and he didn’t like being naked. It made him feel very vulnerable. Hell does that to you: it breaks down your confidence, it makes you feel vulnerable. And there certainly are a great number of things to be vulnerable to in Hell, as well. It’s a very carefully planned place, like a gigantic anti-amusement park. Rosenthal sat on the rock, feeling it scorching his skin, and looked out across the burning lake of sulfur. Noxious clouds of gas wafted through the gloom; the heat was intolerable; and however Rosenthal shifted position, he found no relief from the torment. He shrugged. That was the idea, he supposed, but he didn’t have to like it. He stood up again on one foot until he couldn’t bear it any longer, then hopped to the other foot, then sat down, then stood up again this was going to be a hell of a way to spend eternity. At least there were no devils with pitchforks poking at him no devils at all in sight. There should have been, Rosenthal thought. Devils would have made a nice symmetry with the angels he’d seen in Heaven. As a matter of fact, search as he might, Rosenthal neither saw nor heard another being of any sort, anywhere. No damned souls, no gleeful demons he appeared to be all alone. Maybe that was his punishment, maybe he was supposed to wander around this immense and awful place alone forever. He shrugged again; he thought he could handle that, if that was the worst of it. He decided to take the measure of his prison, because that was the appropriate thing to do at this point in an adventure. You pace your cell, you catalogue whatever objects your jailer permits you to have, you seek weaknesses where you know there are none, you tap on walls and try to communicate.
Rosenthal skipped from one foot to the other, wanting to see what was in the direction opposite of the lake of burning sulfur.
He came to a plain that seemed to bum with solid fire, as the lake had burned with liquid fire. This was the very same plain to which Satan swam, where he and Beelzebub first realized their miserable fate, according to Milton. Of course, Rosenthal didn’t know anything about that; he’d never heard of Paradise Lost, and the only Milton he knew was his dead wife’s brother, supposedly a bigshot in the schmatte trade who always had a million reasons why his mother should stay with Rosenthal and his wife because this macher-schmacher Milton had all his money tied up in his spring collection or he was too busy wheeling and dealing to worry about the old lady or something. Rosenthal made a wry face; Milton would learn a thing or two when he died. There was something in there about honoring your father and mother, Rosenthal recalled. He wished he could be there when some angel asked Milton about his last confession.
Rosenthal, just as others before him, began slowly to comprehend the immensity of punishment. It was hot. It was gloomy all the flames cast “no light, but rather darkness visible” (as Milton put it). It stank. It reminded Rosenthal very much of the apartment on Second Avenue he’d lived in as a child, where his own parents had stayed until they’d succumbed to old age. He had never been able to persuade them to move uptown, to Florida, anywhere but Second Avenue. His father had once waved an arm that took in all of that small, cabbage-reeking apartment and said, “There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Rosenthal didn’t know what the hell the old man had meant. He just knew his mother and father wouldn’t leave that apartment if Eddie Cantor himself came back from the dead to talk to them about it.
Rosenthal hopped from one foot to the other. “Goddamn it,” he shouted in agony, “I wish my goddamn feet would stop burning!” And just like that, his feet stopped burning.
“Hey,” said Rosenthal. He took a couple of steps around the fiery plain, testing. He was surprised, a little puzzled. The soles of his feet had cooled, or rather they had toughened so that it no longer tortured him quite so much to stand in one place. He looked down at himself and was not pleased by what he saw: his skin had become tough and leathery and the color of old, scuffed shoes. He was as ugly as pardon the expression homemade sin. After a moment’s thought, however, he shrugged. “So nu,” he said, “if I have to look like the outside of a football, I’ll look like the outside of a football. At least I won’t die from hopping around.” He learned that he could walk anywhere, sit anywhere, even lie down and rest for short periods without too much discomfort. There was always some pain after a while; but, naturally, this was Hell. You couldn’t expect miracles.
He pushed his luck what could he lose? “I don’t like being naked, either,” he said. “What if somebody should come by?” And just like that, he was wearing some kind of scratchy, rough, ill-fitting, foul-smelling robe. “Pen,” he said, but at least he had clothes.
He headed across the murky plain, hoping that moving around a little would air out his robe. He chewed his lip and thought. “How about something to drink?” he said. And just like that, he had a mug filled with something that tasted exactly like his Uncle Sammy’s homemade wine. Once his Uncle Sammy had tipped over ten gallons of that wine in his basement, and he never had a roach problem down there again. It was the worst stuff in the world. Rosenthal swallowed it, grimacing; hell, what could you ..expect, Manischewitz Concord Grape?
His eyes opened wider as he realized that life in Hell might not be so terrible, if he had some kind of unseen delivery service
to take care of his wants. As a matter of fact, as he considered one thing and another, it was almost comfortable. It wasn’t so bad as he had imagined; it wasn’t much worse than getting stuck on the subway at rush hour, except here he didn’t have all those sweaty, obnoxious people jammed in his face. He had privacy and leisure and, if it hadn’t been Hell and if he hadn’t still suffered every moment, he would have had peace. He heard his mother’s voice saying, a million times, “You can’t have everything, Moity. You can’t have everything.”
After he accepted the tolerable nature of his situation, he grew bewildered. After all, he had been cast out of Heaven (or, at least. Heaven’s front office). He had been sent to Hell; he shouldn’t be in such a good mood. Sure, the darkness and the stench and the scorching still unsettled him. Let’s be truthful if he paid any close attention to the panorama of desolation around him, he began to quake with dread and despair. Still, he shouldn’t have it so good. He shouldn’t have been able to wish up his tough, blackened hide and clothes and his Uncle Sammy’s godawful wine. He should have been denied everything. But he wasn’t about to bring that to anybody’s attention.
Rosenthal shuffled across the incandescent plain until he thought he saw a wall in the distance, looming ominously through the smoky dimness. “Then there’s an end to Hell,” he said. That notion cheered him a little. He had no way of knowing how much time had passed as he walked; he became neither hungry nor tired, and his surroundings did not change a single detail from eon to eon. He may have walked hours or days or years he could not say. At last, however, he came to the blackfaced cliff that bordered the plain. It rose up straight and formidable like the shaft of a great well. Rosenthal guessed that this barrier surrounded the whole of the plain with the burning lake in the center. Although the cliff slanted slightly away from the true vertical, it was still too steep and sheer for Rosenthal to climb. He stood gazing upward into the hazy heights, lost in thought, until he was startled by the sound of a voice behind him. The voice was terrified. “Mama!” it screamed.
Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves Page 12