Former estate of the
artist, recent gift of
the Vincent Astor
Foundation.
Title:
Patient Number
After After
We found it impossible to express the change that appeared in the very countenances of the people……They would open their windows and call from one house to another, “What good news?” And when they answered that the plague was abated, and the bills (of deaths) decreased almost two thousand, they would cry out, “God be praised!” and would weep aloud for joy … And such was the joy of the people, that it was, as it were, life to them from the grave.
They shook one another by the hands in the streets, who would hardly go on the same side of the way before. I could also set down many extravagant things done in the excess of their joy as of their grief; but that would be to lessen the value of it …
Human help and human skill were at an end. The common people went along the streets, giving God thanks for their deliverance…. Indeed, we were no more afraid now to pass by a man with a white cap upon his head, or with a cloth wrapped round his neck, or with his leg limping—all which were frightful to the last degree but the week before.
But now these streets were full of them, and these poor recovering creatures, give them their due, appeared very sensible of their unexpected delivery …
I can go no further here. I should be counted censorious, and perhaps unjust, if I should enter into the unpleasing work of reflecting … upon the unthankfulness and return of all manner of wickedness among us, which I was an eyewitness of myself.
I shall therefore conclude the account of this calamitous year with a coarse but a sincere stanza of my own, placed at the end of my ordinary memorandums the same year they were written:
A dreadful plague in London was.
In the year sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred
thousand souls
Away, Yet I alive.
Appendix
July 3, 1984
Fiction: Approx. 50,000 wds.
Please return in SASE to:
Hartley Mims jr.
PO Box 6114, Canal Street Station
New York, New York 10011
TOWARD A MORE PRECISE IDENTIFICATION OF THE NEWER ANGELS
Having just died, having been judged unexpectedly worthy, you—new recruit—find yourself transposed up those infinite octaves separating you, the truly righteous, from the rest of those deadbeats left down there.
Glad you’re aboard. You’ve earned it.
You are saved from the ranks of the dull and greedy. You are set apart from the recent attorneys general whose one defense ran, “I have not been indicted yet.” How does it feel, being finally unlatched from pain? I am here to welcome you.
I have greeted many.
(Some complain that during these wake-up calls, I “editorialize.” But, for me, you see, strong opinion is paradise.) Been here for absolute ever. My exact age, thank God, is finally irrelevant. I can’t believe how much I cared. Time was such a Drag. My dears, we are well shut of it.
In Paradise, we organize by color. Later, God will put on such a show for you. You’ll see hues that you cannot yet name. I will teach you what we call each one.
What do you thousands of souls have in common? A superstitious fondness for the lucky numbers 1, 3, and 7. For the color red. Among you, find more Geminis and Scorpios than any other sign—(we notice astrology but don’t quite believe it here either).
As a group, you all exhibit a sense of humor often criticized as “infantile.” You have a secret sweet tooth. You enjoy playing around. You show a passion for collecting anything from salt-cellars to orphans. There’s real talent at empathy, a quiet yet profound interest in sex (more about that later). You’ve each kept a garden, if only a windowbox. The amount of fund-raising you did, we angels first admired, then pitied. Your virtue runs alongside a scofflaw’s hatred for paying parking tickets.
And, today there’s the surprise element. First, you feel astonished at the fact of a Paradise, any paradise. Then you’re shocked on being picked for it. But, see, that constitutes your righteousness, you silly willies!
Yes, there is a Hell. And it’s becoming quite the crowded spot just now. But why bother your pretty little heads about that? My job is to situate you here. —Even so, is it not delicious? Picturing the pain endured by certain lowlifes who divorced you, overborrowed from you, and, in forty-nine cases present, killed you! —They’re finally really paying. Hell is their constant root canal. Torture will keep them screaming through eternity. (Never doubt God loves you.)
We find our entering class gets annually smaller. Even so, what still ascends to us, it deeply edifies. You constitute whatever center of the moral universe still holds. Lately, little has. Attendant rewards await you.
It is those I wish to sketch. Among your group, find no representative of the Executive or Legislative branches. A handful from Judicial did squeak through. As usual, very few of the professionally religious made our last cut. There is some fairness, after all. A shocker in itself, no?
—Odd, but Immortality is quite easy to embrace (especially one’s own). What’s harder to accept is justice.
(This, you’re in, is the indoctrination for Westerners. We have an African and an Asian session going on concurrently. Though you can now speak every language, God considers certain rewards untranslatable except into the language that you used most recently. —Even here, nobody’s everybody.)
How does it feel, opening your eyes on pure vista-possibility? It’s all horizon here, and never dark, and your very feet are planted on gelatinous light. What is it you miss most? That too shall find you on high. Room service knows your every wish; it’ll be up shortly.
Let’s call this Freshman Orientation, shall we? You will soon learn house rules for The Conversation. It is my joy to describe certain literal facts of your sudden exquisite setup.
Magna—Blue: II
Shall we begin with your new shapes? I see a few in back starting to notice each other. No criticism implied, go on. True, you’re altered. Actually “transformed” (to do the Miracle full credit).
You will each find, upon more careful examination, that you’ve been minted into an envelope of white light. Your brand-new semi-see-through carapace is composed of cloud salt-granules. Your body-packet contains only about as much gummy connective tissue as is found in, say, one good-sized fertile earthly salamander, or, the glue of nine, count ’em, nine, commemorative stamps.
Touch your face. It is still yours. We, the angelic, might at first appear similar. But our essential personal differences have been archivally and lovingly preserved. God has quite the filing system. This is a Soul Museum. It stars only those souls that remained transitive and evolving, not ones long since exhausted, set and stuffed. Certain traces of the old world have come along with you intact. Many other saints will seem, like you, dark horses for eternal life. There is a woman here who seduced her son unknowingly. There is a someone present who murdered another. The top crowd is never quite what you expect. The skills rewarded here are not wage-earning ones. You were mainly kind to others. You were each very good with your hands. You were all pretty good in the sack.
Paradise would not deprive you of that most beautiful achievement constructed during your earthly sentence. I mean, of course, your hard-won Character. We all struggled to stay honest, we each endured a different set of trials. We are not just another army. Soon I will lead you into touching those few outward parts of yourself left utterly intact.
First, caress your face. Fingertips will hint: You now wear a cataracted helmet shielding your former features. You are pressing your new face. It encloses and eternally preserves the old one. —I must say, the new one looks far better. Believe me. I’m out here. I can see you.
The wings are there, of course, behind. Not to fret, don’t consider them a responsibility. Clear of your sight, they’re useful should you ever need them,
like overabundant closet space. In time, we’ll be getting back to your wings.
I note your expression, 89th from the left, 140 rows back. I’m like you. On first arriving, I also found the whole concept of Wingedness a little retro. This far into time’s vertical future, “wing shapes” are more a tradition than a flight requirement. Since we can now time/space travel at will, such canaryish trappings strike me as coy, vestigial, and pesky as were appendixes last go-round. —But nobody asked.
Still, I am allowed to dissent. Crabbiness has always offered me a pleasure supernatural. So, God—having somehow slipped up and made me an angel—allows this level of crossness to grumble on forever. God’s really sorta good at this.
Heaven has been tailored to our former faults, not just our dull on-rolling merits. Bliss is never general.
If you envisioned something in your last life, you can fully do that here. Not “do,” but “have done.” For, to picture a deed in Paradise is to enact it, is to instantly recall it. That is a paradox of God—He/She has never been an entity dwelling in Present tense. God is perfect Memory, the energy to Play, plus endless Time. Anything that was ever forgotten (that is, absolutely everything) eventually finds us here, in our ecstatic Lost and Found. But I get ahead of myself, or behind …
If you nursed one unacted wish below, if you loved someone who ignored you, here that yen has already been fulfilled to the point of sorest satiation. Find it well-stowed in the gelid honeyed aspic of collective memory. This is not the zone of Desires Transacted. Heaven is the zone of Desires Recalled. Maybe you wish you had once wisely broken a rule. —Done.
Example? I might say, oh, “Homemade lemon meringue pie, cooling on a Rhode Island windowsill before its browned peaks even get to harden toward stickiness. A confection made twenty minutes back by your own mom who’ll be dead (drunk driver, laundry truck) before supper time—her final creation and gift, steam rising, set in the kitchen window on a tea towel, with a view beyond, of your backyard’s blooming fruit trees. You wander home from school. Mom’s car is gone. You see Mom’s pie waiting. Her baked goods—good, as usual—smell of her standard grated lemon rind, all held by the lightest possible crust. And you, age nine, aching to sneak a wedge, eucharist. In life, you did not. The wreck happened. You could hear it from the house. Aunts converged. Casseroles arrived. The pie was first refrigerated then—as newer treats swarmed in—‘tossed,’ uneaten. But now, in Paradise, wise wisher, you get to taste both it and her.” There, I hear those new lips smacking.
O but I love the sound of your laughter. You cannot imagine the music of first laughs hatching into light here. I spent much of my earthly energy loving others. Know what they did? They all left me. Coming in through the backdoor, I dreaded seeing the note again on the kitchen table, “You were nice and always gentle and so I am not sure why, but I do know I’m gone for good.” The dresser drawers half emptied, our bundled savings fully cleared.
But this time, for all time, for me, it’s always Hello. Hello, forever. Thank you, Gracious God … Such pleasure. I’ve been volunteering for this duty since … you’ve no idea …
If, sudden friends, you find you’re itching under those new wing blades? that’s usual. Not your fault. It comes from burning toward your present purified un-matter. It comes via simple sea salts so missing their other cruder, merely chemical, reality. The early need to scratch is just one of Transformation-retooling’s minor techno-glitches.
That roar you will be hearing intermittently forever is called Euphoria. You’ll learn to tamp it back a bit should it ever interfere with The Conversation. Nothing must ever obscure one glorious word of that, our communal enterprise:
The Conversation, our highest form of folk art. Cerebral, circular, sexual, musical, celestial—you have just arrived midsentence at the longest dormitory bull session on record. Heaven is pure communion with your own source in others, with theirs in you.
The scale of Heavenly talk is not symphonic … that was merely poignant human overreaching. Heaven is Chamber Music, a give-take chat and revelation, confusion finally fully harmonized, a gossip where history, picnic sensation, philosophy, mathematical verity, and especially the earthly acts of eating, eliminating, plus all deeds sexual, have been conjoined to form a single round-the-clock state, a forward beating rolling motion we call Joy. —There, I heard a giggle over there. Good. Go with that.
Some mortals do their weekly Meals-on-Wheels gig just to appease a superstitious prospect of heavenly reward. They missed The Boat. Such climbers and overachievers are not, alas, for us. Not one of them stands among you. Fact is, 39 percent of you are atheists. Were …
All of you got here the hard way, via the back stairs’ long spiral climb. —Among us, find not a single glad-hander from the Business Community of Atlanta. We’ve included only two “career” Manhattanites, and no Parisians. Our ranks … our
Uhum, excuse me. I see you three whispering, on the two hundred and ninety-fifth queue back? Yes, you. Look, I’m sure you’re keyed up. I don’t doubt you have scads to chat about. But I ain’t exactly your average flight attendant up here delivering the same old crash-lore, my dears.
There’ll be mucho time for your little personal exchanges later, thank you … (—I swear, in every group, we get a few …) Where was I? Oh yes, Paradise, etc. Our ranks are comprised solely of seeming nonbelievers who somehow found ways to live believingly.
Having devoted yourselves to the chance of finding meaning—you each came, if-half-by-accident, to actually believe.
In something.
What is the rarest commodity left down there on your self-tainting, self-pitying planet? Belief.
And you bottled your homebrew of it. Belief is a vintage that can only be created a bathtubful at a time. Micro-breweries predominate. You fermented your own, for home use only. And now your joy is just commencing. Believe God. Believe me.
How you suffered. We saw. I know.
What’s coming is such sweet payback, my fellow survivors. Oh, but we tried hard, didn’t we? The wasteful cruelty of that rigged game.
You know my own last conscious thoughts? An awareness of my teeth!
Among you, I see former postmen, four invaluable dental assistants (all were blond and coincidentally named “Sandy”). Back there, transformed today, we have a man from Estonia who drowned and the complete stranger who saw him going under, stopped the car, plunged off a bridge to save him, and drowned trying. Yes, we’ve put you side by side, how lovely, look at them clinging. —Say hello. You’ll know each other here.
Your life alone did not win you Paradise. Your dying did, new children. Yours showed acceptance, subtlety, patience with a bad plan that none of us created. You opened to it, let it roll through you like smoke.
—Perpetual glee is spread luminous before you. And your joy is not just cavorting on those wings (low-maintenance, two in number, semipermeable, and soon as easy to use as were your earthly eyes). No, Heaven’s truest reward is the good company of your cocitizens. Even here, God is best seen refracted among the varieties of human character.
Timbre-Red: III
One of our surprising customs is a pleasure largely unpracticed on Earth for decades: I mean Uninterrupted Visiting. “Hell is other people,” wrote one sad man.
—But, you see, if Hell is other people, so is Heaven.
Heaven is just Other other people.
Imagine speaking steadily, commingling your wings, merging your new skin salamander-fine with, say, Plato? Leonardo, Bach, Mozart, Jane Austen, Rembrandt—who’d still rather draw and does so with a finger in the air. You’re comfortable with George Eliot, Chekhov, Thelonious Sphere Monk, Virginia Woolf, Montaigne, Billie Holiday, and one of the Wright brothers (I can never remember which, but he’s definitely on my side of the antiwing debate).
We’ve Shakespeare (a sexual athlete and absolute stitch). Shakespeare and Lincoln have become inseparable here lately, thick as thieves; Shakespeare thinks he invented Lincoln and—a very funny man, h
is sense of humor dark as corn syrup—Lincoln lets Shakespeare. Typical.
Einstein always mostly wanted to play his violin better and now he’s cosmically fantastical at that. He’ll engage in physics shoptalk solely by performing Mozart, Brahms, and a little Korngold. Buster Keaton, when things get slow, does one of his “falls”—going straight down through clouds, you’ll love it. George Washington? He’s always just sort of standing around, lovely man I guess, but has nothing to say. Jefferson? In Hell. Go figure. —Gandhi, surprisingly, is something of a stick. We do have Henry James, fine company, but—even by our eternal standards—God love him—he can go on.
All these and you are interchangeable, best friends. You have entered a domain of ease and genius known as Play. Competition has been forever expunged. Here, everyone’s achievement becomes everyone’s, circular. The glad ironies pile up.
Yes, we have a Heavenly Choir but its chapel master is not J. S. Bach. Bach feels happy to serve as second in command under one Thomas K. Pine, a former Baptist “Minister of Music” at Hot Springs, Arkansas, whose compositional gifts are, according to Bach, “one hundred thousand times my own.”
Thomas K. Pine was leading a huge youth choir through his own brilliant contrapuntal setting of “Nearer My God to Thee.” This happened in 1901 in a park’s green metal band-shell during a July Fourth celebration when, soaked from the sudden downpour, Mr. Pine was struck and killed by lightning at the age of twenty. For Heaven, the gangly red-haired boy proved something of a shoo-in. Now Bach goes to school to Thomas K. Pine and we’re all the richer for their daily playing. Trust me.
Tips on Things to Try First? You have sudden access to all languages and patois, all facts and contradictions of intergalactic history, and these are constantly at play, as Heaven is daylight steadily. Your mind can go anywhere, can become anyone in any language of any period; some of you have always known this. But here, see, you enjoy God’s own fact-finding support system, all the enabling knowledge ever available—now yours.
Plays Well With Others Page 42