Emails from Hell, Part three

Here is the third email that I received from a soul recently arrived in Hell. The first two are in the posts immediately below. When we last left off, the Apostle John, in Hell, had taken our informant to a telescope where he could look into Heaven.

{Beginning of email}

            I don’t know what I was expecting. Souls walking on clouds of blue cotton candy, playing harps? Actually, there were one or two of them doing this. But most of them drove around in Jeeps. The cloudscape looked like a barren landscape, which looked a little bit like the Middle East or Afghanistan. I was soon to discover that there was a very good reason for this.

            At first I could not quite understand what I was seeing. It was, indeed, a whole bunch of Jeeps, and it had the souls of men in it. They wore combat fatigues and carried AK47s. They drove around in random circles—there is no place to actually go in Heaven—but they were obviously waiting for someone. And they were whooping in ecstasy. They took sharp turns that threw up clods of cloud.

            Then I saw another bunch of Jeeps approaching them. It also had men in it with AK47s, but these men had head scarves and long beards.           

            A man from the first group held up what appeared to be a Bible, waved it in the air, and screamed out, Praise Sweet Jesus! Someone from the second group of men held up what appeared to be a Koran, waved it in the air, and screamed out, Praise Allah!

            Then both groups dropped their books, got out their guns, and started shooting at each other. This went on for a long time. There was a sun in the sky—not the source of light, but a sort of timekeeper—and one of the Bible guys held out his arm toward it and commanded it to stop so that, just as in the days of Joshua, they could have a longer day for slaughtering their enemies.

            Finally they had fired enough rounds that several of the men were literally pulverized into little puddles of flesh. Others ran from their group toward the other and started fighting at close range, until one of the jihadists blew them all up. What was left was a big, quivering, bloody pile of protoplasm. The jeeps were smoking hulks.

            As I was watching, the Bible slipped off the edge of the cloud and fell down into Hell, landing close enough to me that I could run and grab it. The other group apparently lost a Koran in the same way. It was covered with blood and gore (no mud; it was from Heaven) but, as I started turning the pages, I saw no evidence that it had ever been read.

            John urged me to go back and look in the telescope again. The giant amoeba that had once been two armies of men started separating into two globs and moving apart from one another. Slowly, they formed back into the men who had slaughtered one another. But this time the two groups ignored one another. The men who did not notice the loss of their Bible sat on lawn chairs and joked with one another—of course, I could not hear what they said—as women with coiffures and lipstick brought them bottles of cold beer.

            Meanwhile, the men who did not notice the loss of their Koran sat on rugs as women in robes—twenty-four virgins for each man—ran to them and started feeding them dates. It didn’t take long before each group was swirling in an orgy of food and sex, followed by naps.

            “You mean,” I said to John, “they can live off of beer and dates forever?”

            “They’re spirits, remember,” he said. “No actual nutrition is necessary.”

            Then both groups of men started doing the whole thing over again. I asked John what was going to happen next.

            “They do the same thing over and over again, forever,” said John. “This is heaven to them: to slaughter heretics and infidels. Sometimes they use bayonets and scimitars, just for a little variety.”

            Then I saw a woman, eternally old, sitting off to the side, weeping. I could not tell from her clothing which side she was on. I asked John who she was.

            “She is a mother who has lost her son,” John said. “Oh, her son is right there, she can see him, but every day she has to watch him being killed and then, when he comes back to life, he doesn’t ever think of her, because he is totally engaged in the orgy.”

            I asked John if this was the only thing that ever happened in Heaven. What was his answer? I will save that for a later communication.

{End of email}