THE ENCOUNTER
The Father passed golden arches looking warily to his left and to his right. He entered a hallway that was narrow and on every side stood men in uniforms; the kind he had seen just before, all of them holding truncheons and basting them against their fists to the beat of his every step.
The ground had a specific color about it. And the walls too, that from the ground, erected high into the air, a lot further than he could see, they and the ground beneath his feet, they had a specific color about them. They were the color of degradation. They were the color of filth, of disease and depravity. They were the color of suffering and of starvation and abuse.
The Father could see, in a room beside him, a great winged beast, sharpening its talons against the round of a human skull. Beside it, two men fought to the death while, beside them, Death stood in front of a burning lamp, trying to capture his own shadow.
And beside him, a lonely poet hanged himself.
Over and over again.
“What were you expecting? Rainbows and unicorns?” mocked the poet.
The Father hobbled into the main corridor. He was standing on a strip of yellow tape that led from the golden arch, through the main courtyard and into the dormitories. His feet stood on either side of the thin strip with his knees buckling from fear. He had his body hunched and twisted and his arms crossed over thighs, covering his naked genitalia.
As he edged forwards, his feet sloshed about in some foul smelling decay, feeling, between his toes, a warm sticky fluid and what felt like broken bones and tiny shards of glass, the kind that could not be picked out too easily.
The Father kept his eyes anchored to the yellow strip, lifting his head only briefly to glance to his left and to his right before quickly withdrawing back to the filth about his feet, that which swished and swayed about as he moved, giving glimpses in the distance of the yellow strip coming to some kind of a bend.
He tried to look only at his feet, but he could feel hundreds of millions of eyes all following his every step, dressing his concern with their predatory stare. Some of them just looked on, welcoming another soul past the heavenly gates while others whistled and jeered and taunted his fright with threat and alarm, raining spit and bodily fluid in his direction, casting insult upon his ear and inviting him into violation.
As he moved, his head banged against something wrought and something iron. He cowered further, keeping his hands cupped around his crotch, but he didn’t stop, he didn’t dare. He looked up briefly from his lowered stare, leaving his head hanging where it was, but staring up from beneath his furrowing brow.
Above him, from a roof he could not see, a roof that was surely colored the same disparity as the walls and the floor, hanged scores of chains and from them, blunt and rusted razors and hooks.
And some of the chains were slim, and there were a great many linkages, and others were tremendous and immobile, the kind used to slow ships. And everywhere he looked, his path was painted, in and out of their jagged rusted barnacles and sharp catching hooks.
And the smaller chains, of which were there a great many, they swung about freely in the air of hilarity that billowed from both sides of The Father as hundreds of thousands of millions of faces, all them surly and repulsive, all laughed and snorted and snarled and hurled a fashion of abuse at the naked, frail and shaking soul who had just entered through Heaven’s gates.
The Father lowered his stare once more. He edged along, one foot after the other, feeling all sorts of strange sensations between his toes and trying to numb the thought, of what they could be. He ignored too, the temptation to look into the eyes of those who hurled abuse like confetti, inviting him as a guest of their no good intentions and their vile presumptuous ways.
“New meat” screamed one man.
“I’ll have that ass” screamed another, licking his salacious lips.
The hundreds of thousands of millions of faces all erupted in laughter, sick decadent laughter. Most threw whatever was in their hands or nearby. Some threw cups and knives and splinters of wood, picked out of their teeth while others threw rocks and pebbles and handfuls of dust. And others threw soiled papers, their feces and semen.
And it all rained down on The Father. Some of it splashed in the water by his feet, which then splashed up into his face and wet his shivering lips. Some of it smacked against his shoulder blades as he twisted and turned his body, ducking his head into the curve of his shoulders, in the same way, he had seen others, escaping the accosting annoyance of the afternoon rain.
He shut his eyes and imagined himself walking straight, right through a river of black fetid water, following the yellow line that submerged and emerged from the sweat and excretion of this wretched place. He dared not think of what it was that now ran from the tip of his head, into his ear and then hanged off his lobe to the run down the back and between his buttocks.
The Father edged on, wishing he were somewhere else.
“Hey sweetie,” said a voice. “You aint got no friends, do ya? You can be mine if you like.”
The Father didn’t respond. He kept his head low and continued slushing though the water.
“Don’t be mean baby?” the voice said. “I aint like the rest of these brutes. Baby, I’m gonna love yah. You wanna be loved, don’t ya?”
Laughter echoed through the courtyard and with it, the rattling of rusted chains.
“Everybody needs be loved,” said the voice, sounding heavyhearted.
The Father ignored the sobbing.
He ignored the stickiness on his skin.
He ignored the cutting and pulling from hooks that caught on his legs and on his elbows.
He ignored too, the violent threats and the sexual taunts.
“Be my baby” shouted the voice as The Father scuttled off through the courtyard. “Be my baby. Be my baby please baby, be my baby. Be my baby or ‘I’ll make you my fucking bitch.”
The taunting started again and no matter how far along the yellow line he was, The Father was forever surrounded by jeering faces and their torrid verbal abuse. And the horrible things that they said and the way that they described them, violently masturbating and sticking their tongues out with their eyes wide, crazed and white as they listed adjective after adjective and verb after demented verb.
And he knew, he could feel it, there was no exaggeration in the things that they said.
“Hey, you” shouted a young man’s voice, to The Father’s right, but further ahead along the yellow strip. “Hey,” he said again. “Holy shit, it’s you. Holy shit. I know that guy.”
The voice, it didn’t sound as vulgar as the others. It sounded familiar, like a face that he couldn’t put a name on. The young man pushed through row after row of men, women and children, all hurtling abuse and vile defecation.
“Hey,” he said; his smile now maddening. “I know you. Hey, it’s me.”
The Young Man shouted out through the front rows of emaciated aggressors and stumbled out onto the yellow strip, just behind The Father who was steady and focused in how he pretended that none of this was real.
“Slow down, hey slow down. I’m not gonna hurt ya.”
The Young Man caught up with The Father and walked at a scratching pace along the yellow strip with the hunched over soul. He went to put his hand on The Father’s shoulder but was shuddered away; first, by The Father’s nervous bother and second, by he himself, from his fingers pressing against the lathering filth that stick to The Father’s skin.
“Hey you, you’re new here. It’s ok man, you can trust me. You just died?” spoke a voice, pointing out the obvious.
The Father turned his head and saw The Young Man walking beside him and he saw too, for the first time, the collage of murderous and maligning faces beyond the yellow strip, all of them sneering and snarling in some way or another; some of them biting and gnashing their teeth, others licking their cracked and salivating lips like horned and thirsted lizards.
The Father held his breath, tightened his skin and
walked with head low while the worst that he could imagine rained down on him from the worst sort of monsters who jostled about, climbing over one another like insects, crawling into his inner sanctum and scaring him from the core of his soul to the thick of his skin.
“It’s like this for everyone. Don’t feel too bad. But worry though yeah? Oh man, I can’t believe it’s you.”
The Father lifted his head and saw a boy standing before him smiling, his hand outstretched welcomingly, his bright orange hair, long and unkempt, his long skinny arms, blotched with bruises and millions of orange freckles, his teeth and the tips of his fingers stained a dirty brownish yellow, his finger nails, long, crooked and clogged with black dirt and filth and his eyes, looking differently to where he spoke.
“Holy shit it is you. Do you remember me? It’s me, Bradley. Remember? We went to school together. Holy shit, this is awesome. Man, we used to have so much fun” said Bradley, pointing his dirty finger in The Father’s chest and bouncing back and forth in a fit of apparent joy.
“Who?” said The Father.
“Bradley, remember? From school. We played all the time. Had lots of fun and shit. I hanged myself during assembly, in the boy’s toilets, remember?” said Bradley.
The Father looked with strained eyes, training his mind to calculate the look of the boy in front of him and divide by his sense of familiarity. Then; in between the beating of his heart, it came to him. He knew this boy and they had gone to school, but they were never friends.
“Fun? You teased me. You picked on me. You bullied me. You hurt me in front of the other kids. They all picked on me top you know, because of you, cause they didn’t want to be bullied by you so they hit me” said The Father, but as he spoke, he remembered his fear of the boy and even though he was a man, he felt that fear like he felt it when he was just a boy himself and he no longer had the courage to say the things he needed to say.
“Don’t be a little faggot. What are you, a little faggot?” said Bradley, stepping closer to The Father and pushing into his body as he did so that the clothes he carried in his hands dropped to the floor.
It all seemed so acquainting, the same feelings sinking his stomach and trembling his toes, spelling his lips into a dancer’s quiver so that the words he wanted to say were dressed in a shaking shiver, riding the oscillating air of fright. Around him, the jeering and chanting monsters of men all encircled around him, edging him closer to Bradley, their fists pumping into the air, their voices aligned, all canting the want of a fight.
When he was a boy, The Father had spent the entire of his school years, scared of this boy; scared of telling a teacher scared of telling his careless father and scared of hitting back. He dreamed about it time and time again but when he needed it, he couldn’t fetch that same strength from that same well of requital from unto which he drank deeply upon his own company, carving with a thin rusted blade, every ‘fuck you’ he wished he could say into his pale white arm in long thin concealable cuts.
The Father looked at his arm where the think lines once gone now rose in red, swollen tints across his arm. He felt them burn and the burn made his heart beat hard, making his blood feel warm and full of venom. He thought of his wife who he had seen last, flash past his face and fly into an open field as the car he was driving wrapped itself around a tree. Then he thought of his daughter, whose last memory etched as a last breath being taken, nothing more. A hollowing sound that echoed in his mind and willed his heart to boil his blood. And then he thought of his boy, who had done so much wrong, many things worse than he would dare imagine, but unto whom the fires in his heart burned strongest.
“Fuck you, Bradley,” he said stepping forward and taking the red headed boy in an embrace. “Your mother gave you to your father’s cruel punishment. They left you alone. You were hurt, but the only way you knew to express hurt was by hurting people, like your father, hurt you. You were messed up. It wasn’t your fault. It’s just a fucked up world. I know your father did things, bad things. Nobody should ever have to confuse those sorts of things with love, but you did and that’s fucked up. I don’t want to hurt you. I just wanna say, fuck you Bradley” said The Father, squeezing the red headed boy tightly until the fibers of the boy’s heart bled from the pores of his skin and ran up The Father’s arms turning to a light cloud of dust by his eyes and then vanishing into nothingness.
“Keep moving” ordered a uniformed man, beating him over the head with his truncheon.
The Father leaned down carefully and collected his pile of clothes and continued walking down the corridor, pushing through the monsters of men who had encircled him, lifting his head high, looking left and right through every uniformed man standing about for the shape of his family.
The corridor seemed to stretch on forever and with every step he encountered more and more insult as if the will of heaven alone were to try and break him and to reduce him to nothing.
Whereas before, he looked only to his shuffling feet, now he stared each face long in the eye and counted familiarity in each stare looking back.
He had thought them all as mad strangers and this corridor as some carriage through hell, but now that he lifted his sight he could see it was oh so much worse. He knew all of the faces and remembered all of their affronting voices, each and every one having acted some cruel part in the absurd play of his life.
There was the guy who always begged for food at the corner of his work who would curse and bitch and moan irefully when he given what he asked instead of a trickle of gold coins. There were all of the drivers that had toiled with his days, the ones that cut him off, the ones that flashed their lights incessantly, the ones that honked and screamed like mating boars and the ones that never let him in.
There was his high school teacher; the one who ended up arrested for improper conduct, who thought he was doing all of the children a favor by smacking their hands with his correcting stick to teach them that reward was the absence of punishment. He stood there amongst the piles of people, smacking the ruler against his hand and licking his lips like a sun parched lizard.
Everyone round him was somebody that he had known; some arsehole that had rained on his parade at some point in his life and they were all lined up to welcome him to eternity. The Father returned his stare to the path set out before him and; under guard, continued his walk along the long corridor, ignoring the taunts and abuse and brushing off the stinging pain as this and that, hurled from here or there ricocheted off his skin and rattled across the floor.
He held in his mind, the image of his family; his wife standing by the door of his house, leaning adoringly against the wooden frame, his daughter rushing from the side of her mother with her arms spread like an eagle’s wings, caught in a moment of flight before her joy tripped one foot over the other and beside him, in the passenger seat of his car, his son, looking out through the stained windscreen, his arms folded tightly over his chest, his deflated rebellion anchoring his feet but keeping his eyes locked on his father who was; like the echo of one’s voice, returning to where his heart belonged.
And as he thought this, there before his sight, huddled beneath and a wooden rafter in a cold abandoned corner of heaven was his wife and she looked adoringly at her husband as he walked bravely along the corridor, naked and bleeding with a pile of grey clothes folded in his arms.
“Look who I found,” said The Mother.
The father winced, his heart almost collapsed and the air of heaven captured a tear from his eye as a smiling little girl with straw like strawberry, blonde ran towards him screaming with delight, her arms waving haplessly, her excitement eventually putting one foot too close to the other until she tripped and fell through the air onto her hands and knees. The Father held his breath, watching his little girl and waiting for a smile or a flood of tears.
The Girl lifted her head and chose to smile instead of cry. She picked herself up and kept running to her father who leaned down and took her in his arms, weeping as he held her close to his
chest, feeling her heart beating against his, listening to her breath whisper in and out of her mouth.
“Can we play now?” she asked.
“Are you busy? Do you have to work?” she asked again, the spell of innocence that spilled from her eyes, leaving the father in a state that words cannot describe, that in heaven, is an emotion that one speaks only through the pores in their skin.
“Can we play now daddy? Mummy bringed my butterfly” she said in her own way.
“You’re alive,” he said.
“Don’t be silly daddy. I’m dead, like you and mummy and…”
“Your brother, where’s your brother?” he said looking around desperately hoping to see his son standing somewhere behind him looking on disparaging, but looking on nonetheless.
“They took him,” said The Daughter.
“Who took him? Where did they take him?” asked The Father.
“The soldiers. We didn’t come through together. He did something, that’s what they told me, I’m not sure what. But they took him and I don’t know where” said The Mother.
“Are you ok? Did they hurt you?” he asked, taking his wife in his arms and patting down her body, causing her to wince as his hands passed over bruises and small healing cuts.
The Mother looked despondent. She said nothing. The Father could tell though that something had happened, for her eyes, they spoke of a truth that her educated tongue could not. He knew from her silence that horrible things had been done, no worse and no better than what he himself had endured at the gates of heaven at the hands of these cruel dictators.
“I have to find him. I have to find our son. No one deserves to be alone here, not in this hell” he said.
“Is this hell? This can’t be heaven” The Mother asked.
“Are we in hell daddy?” asked The Daughter.
“Guard” screamed The Father, “I need to speak to someone; a warden, a general, whoever, someone in command. I want to know where my son is and I want to know now.”
Thunder clapped magnificently in his ears and lightening in his eyes, flooding his sight a bright and blinding heavenly white. He squeezed them shut for a second and when they opened; his wife and daughter were gone.
“Good morning, my name is Adolf Hitler, I am the chief chancellor of heaven,” said the only other man in the room.
Heaven is Full of Arseholes Page 5