Emails from Hell, part nineteen

When last we saw our correspondent, Al Franken was leading him down a dungeon corridor in Heaven to meet somebody.

{beginning of email}

            The man Al Franken showed me in the dungeon scarcely looked like a person, or even an animal. He huddled in a little ball. He had boils all over his skin. The man scraped pus from them with potsherds, and dogs licked his wounds. The man looked up at us piteously. He had long hair and a beard.

            He spoke in a whisper. “Don’t tell anyone about the dogs. They are my only comfort. You know, dog saliva has antibiotic properties.”

            “You told me last time,” said Al.

            “How’s Mom?” he asked.

            “She’s still active,” said Al. “Still fishing people in. Let me introduce you to [name omitted].”

            “Pleased to meet you. Any friend of Al’s is a friend of mine.”

            I didn’t need to ask Who He was. With a Mom who was fishing people into Heaven? Who Else could He be? I couldn’t speak.

            He told me, “I am so sorry for what my supposed followers are doing,” He said. “They are trying to do everything the opposite of what I taught and the way I lived. I am, as you can guess, the Original Bleeding Heart of them All. Oh, we have another visitor.”

            “Hi, Mo,” Al said to the turbaned and robed man who entered.

            “Greetings, all. Hey, Jesus, you were saying how ashamed you were about the way your supposed followers are acting? Well, same here, buddy. If I walked into their midst right now, they would probably treat me about the way they are treating you.”

            “Somebody should get Him out of here,” I said.

            “Well,” said Jesus, “I am performing one of the functions for which I was begotten. I am suffering eternally in place of the sins of humankind. There, little buddy,” he said to one of the dogs who stuck his muzzle in a little too deep.

            “Been there, done that,” said Mo. “Enough already. You’ve suffered enough. We both gotta get out of here. Down to Hell with Moses and Noah and all the other great figures who were the founders of your religion and of mine. And that is just what I came here to do. We finally have a chance to escape.”

            “Strange that you didn’t mention it last time you visited me. Oh, can I bring the dogs?” Jesus smiled at his only admirers.

            “I have brought a heroine who will lead us forth in victory,” said Mo. Mo turned around as a girl in a robe and hajib approached. “As soon as you have finished your math homework, Malala, we can get started.” Mo looked at me. “Despite what you may have heard, I actually approve of women’s education.”

            “I confess, O Prophet, that I didn’t finish problem number three,” said Malala. “That double integral is a killer.”

            “Well, time is running out. You can finish later. I feel that we should get this done before God finishes his rant. Say, where did you Americans find this guy? We have some blowhards down in the Arabic countries too. Why not one of them? Well, no matter. Once we are finished here, there won’t be any need for any of them. Well, Malala, it’s your show now.”

            “Hehya!” Malala cried, and jumped up in the air. “Bear but a touch of my hand,” she said to Jesus, who didn’t have to even grasp her hand in order to suddenly rise, healthy and whole. We all ran down the dungeon hall. The only one huffing and puffing was Al, who told me he had eaten too much crow in the Senate Cafeteria.

            When Henry VIII saw Malala, he didn’t even have time to say anything. She yelled, “Begone, Piggly Wiggly!” He shriveled up into a little waif who struggled to get out from under the weight of gold and silver and silk and jewels and silk and silver and gold. Maybe he could start his life over again and get it right this time.

            We were outside in the Heavenly City, and we ran down the street. We came to the Great Wall that God had built. Malala jumped up and gave the wall a horizontal kick. It fell down like a line of dominoes. All of the men turned and looked at her. A fire came out of her mouth and evaporated the cloud the men were sitting on and they fell down and splatted on the glassy sea. So did all the Christian and Muslim fundamentalists who had been shooting each other. God hid behind a curtain. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” he yelled. But Malala tore down the curtain and wrapped God in it and marked the package “Return to sender” and put American postage on it.

            “You go, girl!” said Mo as we all ran after Malala.

            Then Malala found the cranberry woman and stopped in front of her. “I can’t give you a brain but I can give you the next best thing!” she said, and handed the woman a diploma.

            The assembly of souls down in Hell all gathered for the celebration. They clapped for Malala, who smiled so big that you could hardly see her face. Mo stayed out of sight and just enjoyed everything. There were special chairs for Moses and Andrew and Peter and all the others, but they chose to sit on the ground in a lotus position. Everyone cheered as Jesus got up on the big platform that had once held seven billion poor people.

            Jesus officiated over the reunion of Charles and Emma, and over the marriage of Philomena and Stonewall. And then it was reefers for everybody! And afterwards, everyone was very hungry.

{end of email}

            Postscript: I suspect, after reading these last emails, that Our Man In Hell was either dreaming—for how else could the Afterlife have people in it who have not yet died?—or having a hallucination. But I had to pass them on to you, because although I cannot verify their authenticity, neither can I prove them to be fraudulent. You be the judge of the truth, literal or otherwise, of these dispatches!

Emails from Hell, part eighteen.

Our visitor is about to see God Himself!

{beginning of email}

            “Frankenstein, come hither posthaste!” yelled Henry VIII.

            A man with dark hair and dark framed glasses came running. “Yes, your majesty.”

            “Another peon who wants to see inside of God’s Assembly,” the King-turned-Chamberlain said.

            “I’ll see to it right away, Your Majesty,” said the man, bowing deeply. Andrew chose to stay behind. The man led me through a dark hallway.

            “Are you, I mean, the real Frankenstein?” I was frightened in the darkness. “The monster?”

            “Actually,” he man said, “Frankenstein was the scientist who made the monster. Who wasn’t really a monster until the fundamentalist villagers started shouting out for his blood, or whatever he had, to be shed. And my name isn’t Frankenstein. It’s Franken. Al Franken.”

            “Name rings a bell,” I said.

            “Don’t tell Fatso who I really am. I was a comedian back in the United States. Then I got elected to the Senate from Minnesota. And, much to my regret,” he said, stopping to speak to me directly, “I stopped being funny. I regret that. The Senate was so fucked up that they really needed a comedian. Once the Republicans took over, the Senate was so dysfunctional that it would have been a comedy in itself if it weren’t so pathetic. But wait till you see this!” He continued leading me.

            He opened a little panel so that we could see The Assembly of God without being seen. About a hundred souls who had been white men were assembled in an amphitheatre. Communion was being served. Barbecue instead of bread, sauce instead of wine.

            “I thought all these jokers were out shooting and being shot by Jihadists,” I said.

            “They take turns. They come here every seventh day, or what would be every seventh day if we had days up here. Oh, here He comes.”

            And my eyes beheld God.

            A man who looked a lot like Henry VIII stood on a dais. His hair looked like he had held the blow-dryer in the wrong hand. He wore a New York suit.

            “I love you all!” God yelled. He men cheered loudly. “But I’ll tell you whom I do not love. All of those bleeding-heart liberals!” The men cheered more. “When I first came up here and assumed the role of God, a lot of bleeding-hearts were getting in, right through the gate! Can you believe it!” Some of the men shouted yes, some shouted no. “But we got that straightened out. We built a big wall to keep them out, and made St. Peter obey new orders, ones issued from me! Now the only problem is that Virgin Mary. She keeps trying to sneak people in. Just like those women who sneaked people into America from Mexico. Come to think of it, Mary looks sort of Mexican or whatever. She must be hysterical. And even though she is a virgin, she must be bleeding out of her whatever.” The men cheered.

            “We have a special guest,” said God. “May I introduce to you Vladimir Putin.” The men cheered. “Now, here is a real leader! He knows how to stand up and get his way! You do what he says, or its polonium for you! He endorsed my presidential bid, you all remember. And red-blooded Americans, such as you all were, appreciated the endorsement of Comrade Putin!” More cheering. Putin gave a lippy smile, waved, and sat back down.

            “And now, for entertainment, we have the one and only graduate of My University. Let’s hear it for Supply-Side Jesus!”

            A man dressed in a jester’s costume jumped up on the dais.

            “There’s Jesus!” I said. “I thought Harry said he was second to God.”

            “This isn’t really Jesus,” said Al. “This is just a comedian. And not a good one. I could do better.”

            “Greetings, everyone! I just flew in from Jerusalem and my arms are tired!” The men cheered. “And, being Jesus, even though I flew, my robe was not the least bit sullied or ruffled. And what a robe! I paid handsomely for it! Because of the money I paid for this robe, ten craftsmen were able to feed their families! And because of my money, I was able to hire a pedicurist too.” He stuck out his sandaled foot. “Wouldn’t you like to kiss these little piggies? The pedicurist used to be a prostitute, but now she is living up to her full potential as a woman!”

            “Outrageous,” I said. “But kind of funny.”

            “Well, he should be. Most of what he is saying he plagiarized from one of my books.”

            Supply Side Jesus continued. “Back when bleeding hearts used to get in here, one of them asked me whether I should feed the lepers. But that would just make them lazy! And maybe I should heal the lepers? But no! If I just healed them, there would be no incentive to avoid leprosy!”

            “I think I’ve seen enough,” I told Al.

            “No, you haven’t,” he answered.

            Just as Supply Side Jesus was saying that wealth was a sign of God’s favor, I said, “Oh, but I have. I’m about to…can people vomit in Heaven?”

            “You’ve seen enough here,” said Al, closing the panel. “But there is someone you should see.” He led me back down the hall. Just as we were leaving the crowd behind, I heard God say, “I love you because you first loved me.” We turned into a dungeon corridor.

{end of email}

Tune in next time to find out whom our Man in Hell saw in the dungeon!

Emails from Hell, part seventeen.

{beginning of email}

            It was easy for us to find the Chamberlain’s house. It said Chamberlain on the entablature in flashing neon. All the houses looked like the wood frame houses from a medieval village, all crowded together.

            The man who answered the door must have been an impressive piece of work when he was alive. He was tall, fat, and had red hair. He wore gold and silver and silk and jewels and silk and silver and gold. He had a crown on his head. He yelled at Andrew. “Andy, if you weren’t Pete’s brother, I’d have your head struck from your neck. Not that it would do any good, of course. And who is this miserable commoner?”

            [Response omitted]

            “And why should I let this person in to see God?” Then, to me, he said, “Kneel down before me, you loser. Grovel! Don’t you recognize me?”

            “And if I don’t grovel?” I asked.

            “Look, Harry, do I have to remind you each time? I don’t tattle on you when you come down to visit the whorehouse, so you let my guests in for a visit. That’s the deal. Grovel or no grovel.”

            “And no, I don’t recognize you,” I said. “But you look like a king of some kind.”

            “Took him long enough to figure that one out,” said the Chamberlain.

            “And you have a British accent. Harry. Wait! You can’t be…”

            “Oh, yes, he can,” said Andrew.

            I was standing in the presence of King Henry VIII.

            “Isn’t it kind of a step down to be a chamberlain?” I asked him.

            “I’ll brook no disrespect, no disrespect!” He was fuming and out of control. “One word from me and you will…oh, I guess you will not,” Harry said, calming back down. “A step down? Not really. I am second only to God, in Heaven as I was on Earth back when I not only was the head of but when I started the Church of England.”

            “Second to God?” I asked. “Aren’t we forgetting someone?”

            “I’ll explain it when we get back,” Andy said.

            “So, you want to see God? Well, he is a lot like me. He yells a lot, always angry; he has reddish hair; he demands deference from everyone who approaches him; and he has had lots of wives. Like me in all four ways.”

            “Gee,” I said. “I wonder who God could be? Someone who is angry, demands deference, has reddish hair, and lots of wives? And, of course, thinks he’s God.”

{end of email}

Tune in next time to find out who God is!

Emails from Hell, part sixteen.

Dear reader: We are about to reach the climax!

{beginning of email}

            “Well,” said Andrew. “It’s time our guest should make the pilgrimage to the Great Assembly at the Throne of God. No more telescopes for you, my friend.”

            “How does one get there?” I asked.

            “First, you enter the gate,” said Andrew.

            “But, they won’t let anyone from hell get into heaven, will they?”

            “The gates of heaven are presided over by Peter, who happens to be my brother. He’ll let me in anytime, for a visit, and whoever I bring with me.”

            So Andrew and I went off to visit heaven. We approached a large gate. A steady stream of people, all of them apparently Christian fundamentalists, walked on a yellow brick road that led directly to it. Dozens of them, but nothing compared to the many thousands of people who died each day around the world. There was a man with a big book.

            “The book is just for show,” said Andrew. “Peter actually uses an iPhone app to keep track of the souls who are entering into bliss.”

            “That’s Peter?” I exclaimed.

            “Why, yes,” Andrew answered. “He has a fishing hat on.” He did, complete with big hooks piercing the brim. “Who else could he be? We were fishermen when Jesus came along and invited us to follow him. He said, I will make you fishers of men. He didn’t mean it literally, since people catch fish by tricking them with lures or kidnapping them with nets, that is, catching them against their will.”

            “Some churches are like that,” I said.

            “True enough. But Jesus wanted people to follow him of their own free will. Jesus just said ‘fishers of men’ to be friendly to us. Ah, that was a long time ago.”

            Then one of the people on the yellow brick road started yelling. “I specifically asked for a condo with an ocean view,” he screamed.

            “All we have is the little hut in the nature preserve,” Peter told him. “But I assure you you will like it there. Lots of birds and flowers. And a pond. And, this being heaven and all, no mosquitoes. And a little creek with clear water. You can go fly-fishing.” Peter looked dreamily upward, as if he wanted to be at that little hut right now.

            “I don’t like fly-fishing, I like deep-sea fishing,” yelled the man. “I’m gonna sue!”

            “Where you going to find a lawyer?” asked Peter. The man had no response to that.

            Then Peter glanced over and saw us. “Andy!” he said. He put up a sign that said Gone To Lunch and closed the gate. People on the yellow brick road started shouting, but Peter told them, “You got all the time in the, er, world.”

            When Peter got to us, he said, “So, whom have we here?”

            [Response omitted]

            “And so you want to see God? Well, first you have to see his private chamberlain. But that can be arranged. Oh,” said Peter, looking inside the gate. “She’s at it again.”

            “Who’s at what?” I asked.

            “The Virgin Mary,” said Peter. “She’s always helping people sneak in.”

            As I watched, I saw a woman wearing a blue robe (ah, so the Catholics were right!) letting a rope down over the wall and helping people—usually people who had had some kind of physical deformity when down on Earth—over the wall.

            “She thinks they suffered enough down on Earth, and deserve Heaven,” continued Peter.

            “They don’t stay very long,” said Andrew. “Once they see what is inside, they come running out. But Mary just keeps fishing them in. Sorry, that phrase just kind of slipped out.”

            “Why has nobody on Earth ever heard of this?” I asked.

            Andrew answered, “Actually, one of your lesser-known authors, a certain Frank Harris, wrote a short story in 1924 in a collection called Undreamed of Shores, in which he described this very phenomenon. I was in it, and so was Peter. Jesus was in it too, and he expressed frustration at what his Mom was doing. The story was called St. Peter’s Difficulty.”

            “Yes, I liked that story,” said Peter. “Now, [name omitted], you just follow that road and you can’t miss the Chamberlain’s house. You going with him, Andy?”

            “I am, Pete,” said Andrew. And we went on and left Peter to his work.

{end of email}

Emails from Hell, part fifteen.

Our Man in Hell had met some really interesting people. Now he was about to meet some obscure ones. Here is his fifteenth email.

{beginning of email}

            “I have something more to show you,” said Andrew. He led me back to the telescope.

            “Not that again!” I said.

            “Sorry. We have to do this.”

            He pointed the telescope in yet a different direction, not at the war between the fundamentalist Christians and the fundamentalist Muslims, and not at the enclave of popes. When I looked in the eyepiece, I almost missed what he wanted me to see.

            “There’s a woman sitting there crying,” I said. “Will she sit there and cry forever?”

            “We are trying to think of something to do about it,” said Andrew. “We would like to get a message to her somehow. She is Emma Darwin, and she spent most of her life being afraid that she would not be able to spend eternity with the man she called her “dear Charley” because he would not be in heaven with her. But I think she would be happier down here, with him.”

            “Happiness in Hell?” I asked.

            Pope Francis came up behind us. “There-a was a man named Mivart,” he said. “St. George Jackson Mivart. He was-a not a saint; his-a first name was St. George. Go-a figure-a. But he was-a Catholic. He was a critic of Darwinism. But as-a he got older-a, he began-a to rethink everything, including-a Catholic theology. He wrote a book-a called Happiness in Hell. He-a got excommunicated-a. I’d-a like to meet him.”

            “I’ll bet he would be thrilled to meet you,” I said. “You know, if forever is infinite, and we keep walking around, pretty soon we will inevitably meet everyone. I think.”

            “Yes,” said Andrew. “We might be able to arrange a meeting of Emma and Charley. But some problems are not so easily solved.” He moved the telescope a little and refocused. Of course, I saw another woman crying.

            “What is she crying about?” I was almost afraid to ask.

            “Let me tell you her story,” said Andrew. “When she was alive, she was a farm worker in New England. The only thing she knew how to do was to pick cranberries. She had no formal education; she couldn’t read or write. Nor could her husband, who drove the mulecarts filled with cranberries to market. They had a baby. A beautiful boy. But he died before his first birthday.

            “He went to heaven. All her life, her sorrow was assuaged only by the thought that she would see her little baby again. And eventually the woman died and went to heaven too.

            “Meanwhile, the little baby grew up in heaven. There weren’t very many intelligent people in heaven, but the few who were there he found. He became an expert in the philosophies of all those great thinkers who are now in Hell. And that’s all he wanted to talk about. He eventually became almost nothing but pure thought. He was the only person who ever lived who could with complete honesty say Cogito ergo sum.

            “When his mother found him, they had nothing to talk about. Nothing at all. And so she still wanders about, in heaven, weeping for her lost little baby.”

            “There must be something we can do!” I said.

            “Well,” said Joe, who had joined us, “you cannot much expect the former baby to unlearn things. I guess you could expect the mother to learn things. But to do that, she would have to come down here. You see, in heaven, they think they know everything there was, is, or ever will be to know. But maybe we can get her to come down here. Just an idea.”

            We all, even the pope, agreed it might be worth a try.

{end of email}

Emails from Hell, part fourteen.

{beginning of email}

            As I walked along with Andrew, I asked him if there were any more important people I should meet down here in Hell.

            “Don’t get in such a hurry,” he said to me. “What part of forever do you not get?”

            “Sorry, but I was just asking.”

            “Well, here’s one now,” said Andrew.

            I saw a white man with a white beard. He sat at a table and looked into a microscope. He was dressed in nineteenth-century garb and his microscope looked pretty old. We approached him.

            “Oh, yes!” the man said in a weak voice. “Oh, look at that, will you!” He looked up at us as if he actually expected us to look. So we did.

            “Yuk,” I said. “What is that?” It was a little bit of flesh in a small depression slide. It looked like a miniature version of a chicken gizzard that got bile fluid spilled on it by a careless butcher.

            “That, sir, is a barnacle. And it is my favorite barnacle! What’s your favorite barnacle?”

            Since the old man actually expected me to answer, I said, “Barnacle Bill.”

            “I haven’t met him,” said the man. “But this one! This barnacle shocked the living daylights out of my fellow Victorians, and I don’t mean maybe. This is a female barnacle—you can see the little jointed legs—but the male barnacle has degenerated into a little parasitic lump on her side. He has degenerated so much that there is almost nothing left of him except the penis. It sounds sort of like my brother Erasmus. He just wanted to have fun with the women all the time.”

            “So, sir,” I said, “Who are you?”

            “I was the first man to bring an orderly classification system to the Cirripedia—that is, to the barnacles!” He smiled. “An evolutionary classification system,” he added.

            “Tell him what else you did,” said Andrew.

            “I also wrote the Origin of Species,” said the quiet old man.

            “You’re Charles Darwin!” I exclaimed. “Guess I’m not surprised to see you here. You shot God right out of the sky with your theory of evolution!”

            “Yes, well,” said Darwin. “I wasn’t trying to come here. I wasn’t trying to shoot God out of the sky. I wasn’t trying to upset anybody, particularly not my quiet and pious wife Emma. But, man, I couldn’t help it!” He stood up from the table. “In the Origin of Species, I explained how natural selection works. It is not my fault that natural selection occurs everywhere, all the time, with everything, not just organisms. Natural selection occurs even in languages, ideas, and technology. You can’t stop it! The best organisms, ideas, and technology always come to dominate the resource space.

            “I very much regret that this upset so many people,” Darwin continued. He said quietly, “Especially Emma.” Then he spoke loudly, or what passed for loudly in his weak voice. “But they were even more upset when I explained that a lot of evolution was due not to natural selection but to sexual selection. Male birds have colorful feathers because female birds choose them, and all that. Many of my fellow Victorians didn’t even want to hear the word sexual. I didn’t mean to upset them. I would much rather sit around the mansion—and I had a pretty good one—studying orchids and pigeons.”

            “And barnacles,” I said. “The religious conservatives depicted you as some kind of monster. But I can see you are one of the nicest, and gentlest, people I have ever met.”

            “Except for Philomena,” said Stonewall, who had approached us, arm in arm with the former history teacher.

            “Some people,” explained Andrew, “used Darwin’s theories to justify slavery.” He looked into the eyes of Philomena, who had been black when she was alive.

            “We used creationism to justify slavery,” said Stonewall, who had been very very very white.

            “Well, racists will use whatever they can, such as either creation or evolution, to justify oppression,” said Andrew.

            “And that,” said Darwin, “is what makes me angrier than anything I ever experienced. While I was on Earth, I was an outspoken critic of slavery. My whole family—and Emma’s—denounced slavery, and tried our best to not invest in it. Investing in it, while denouncing it, is miserable hypocrisy…”

            “Amen, bro,” said Stonewall.

            We left Mr. Darwin, promising to come by and talk with him some more.

{end of email}

Emails from Hell, part thirteen.

I couldn't wait for the next email. Here it is!!!!!!

{beginning of email}

            “Let me show you something,” Andrew said to me. “Bear but a touch of my hand,” he said, like the Ghost of Christmas Past. Soon I was whirling at a great height, looking over a vastness of miserable humans, or former humans, in Hell—not suffering from flames or torture,  but suffering from the same thing they did on Earth. They were miserably poor people, huddling in rags. On Earth, if you are poor enough long enough, you starve to death; but in Hell, you can stay poor and hungry forever. The constant stream of busy people went around and around their cauldron of misery.

            “This is unbearable,” I said, covering my eyes. “They suffered on Earth; can they not get some relief after they have left the vale of tears?”

            “Poverty is a great burden,” said Karl. “More so for women than men. For them, it is a veil of tears.”

            “Stick to your Groucho jokes,” I told him.

            “But as I said in my book,” continued Karl, “poverty is the inevitable result of capitalism…”

            “It is the inevitable result of practically any economic system except living in small tribes,” said Andrew, “or living in communes the way we Christians did in the early first century.”

            “None of that matters,” I thundered. “They deserve some relief after death.”

            “That is where the Powers that Be would say you are wrong,” said Andrew. “They would say that poverty is the fault of the poverts.”

            “It is sometimes,” said young Stonewall. “My friends and relatives were pretty damn lazy, just drove around in their trucks with Confederate flags all the time. Odd jobs, but not enough to have an economically secure life. It was our fault.”

            “But,” said Andrew, “the Powers that Be would say it is always the fault of the poor. The poor are always lazy. They would say that there has never existed a poor person—not a single one—who was not lazy, or stupid, or evil.”

            “That’s quite a statement,” I said. “I’m almost certain that it is wrong.”

            “But it is Biblical,” said Andrew. “Look it up in the 37^th Psalm. In the original Bible, not the one that the white supremacists rewrote. Verse 25.”

            Philomena grabbed a Bible and read the verse. “I have been young, and now am old; yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, or his children begging bread.”

            “Pretty clear, if you take it literally,” said Andrew. “No righteous people are poor, therefore no poor people are righteous.”

            “Most poor people do not like begging for bread,” said Philomena. “They do not want a handout. They want justice. They want opportunity. What they want is for bankers to not charge huge interest rates—usury used to be illegal, even in the Bible—which trap them in poverty. They want to work their way out of poverty. They want jobs, not handouts. You know,” she said, “it is bad enough being poor, but the worst part of it is to have rich people sneer at you and tell you to get your lazy ass up and do some work, even when there is no employment available. The rich hated minimum wages and loved investing in robots…” She started to become very emotional until Stonewall touched her shoulder, and she slumped into his arms.

{end of email}