Chapter 2
Ire
Roused from dreams of bygone omnipotence, I, the Eternal Eye, awake in wrath. Things abominable are being perpetrated close at hand. I feel that quite strongly. I feel all manner of abomination in the world, of course. To merely skim the endless black catalogue of iniquities and lubricity: tagging of edifices of worship, violation of virginity and dietary laws, child and self abuse and, most heinous of all, blasphemous complaints. But for long now these things have been no more than a buzz in Mine ear, save for the blasphemous complaints. To have awakened Me, this wrongdoing must be much closer to home, in the Great Good Place where I dwell and largely sleep. I shall now locate the precise area of infection.
Can it be? Again? Yet again? I shall betake Me to the Reception Department of the Préfecture de Police and view the latest arrival of Good Americans and determine the nature of the abomination and duly chastise it.
Awake, I shall unavoidably be assailed by the worldwide chorus of petitioners and protesters on the subject of Good Americans. I had hoped that now, in semi-retirement, no longer concerned with the universe but, intermittently, with one tiny speck of it by the River Seine, I would cease being importuned by supplicators. I hear them now despite the deaf ear I turn to them. From all the nations of the world, save the mightiest of these, rises the bickering envious chorus: “Why the Americans and not us? Why? Why? Why?” When awake I hear it without cease, sickened to the soul by those endless wails and jeremiads concerning My Second Chosen People, couched in trivial terms: “Why the Americans? Why them and not us? Who needs wings and harps and unisex white gowns? Who wants them? What we want After is Paris, like the Americans. Why them and not us?”
It cannot be denied that the Great Good Place, as I prefer to name it, is an enviable destination, richly endowed with four-star fleshpots which I delight in frequenting. The inhabitants’ heavy-footed heavy-tongued eastern neighbors (whose cuisine, let it be said in passing, stinks to high heaven) are wont to say: “Glücklich wie Gott in Frankreich.” Happy as God in France. True. Not that I would belittle the land of the Second Chosen People. It is marvelous of course, despite the inferior quality of the fleshpots. They name it God’s Country; hyperbole, to be sure, but how can I not be flattered at that? I like to visit it from time to time but am not sure that I would like to dwell there.
The Great Good Place is something else altogether. I must confess that now in My declining tranquil days of semi-retirement I take pleasure in strolling about, in the cool of the day if possible, in certain quiet provincial-like quartiers shaded by leafy chestnuts. I shun crowds. Clamor and agitation tire me quickly. I am grateful for the Great Good Place’s numerous quiet empty churches where I can rest untroubled. Grateful too for the calm of its vast cemeteries. Nobody recognizes Me in the form I assume during My visits. To look upon Mine unmediated Face is to be dazzled to blindness and insanity. But take heed not to jostle a certain bearded old gentleman with the red Commander of the Légion d’Honneur insignia in his lapel buttonhole. The last offender to have done that was reduced to a smear, seconds later, by a Number 38 bus on the Porte d’Orléans-Porte de Clignancourt line.
That intervention took much out of Me. It is no longer as in time past when for six days, as I dimly recollect it, I labored mightily without respite, banishing dark chaos, creating lesser and greater lights in the firmament, summoning forth the ocean and the dry land and all manner of beast and bird and, in a moment of culpable weakness I was later to rue, Man.
A day’s rest sufficed to recover from those labors and on Monday I was up and about, everywhere at once, inspiring prophets and saints, imposing diets and ritual, upholding, downbringing, halting the sun, cleaving the seas, decimating evil-bent hosts, generating whirlwinds and out of them posing mighty insoluble conundrums to blasphemous wailers on their dung-heaps, etc, etc.
Where did I get the energy in those days? Only in dreams can I exercise that omnipotence now.
But I digress. That vast envious chorus strives to rouse Me to wrath against My Second Chosen People. They cry out in their trivial parlance: “Don’t they already control everything in this life? Monopolize the global hamburger-circuit and the global cinema-circuit with their miraculous special effects, daring to compete with Thee in that? And how about those defiant Babel-like towers of theirs, violating the heavens? Or the way they rain long-distance brimstone and fire on so-called rogue cities, having the chutzpah to measure themselves with the Most High Himself by decreeing who, among nations, is Good and who Evil.
“Instead of wrathful punishment (say the spiteful jealous voices) why that reward, After, for puffed-up presumption? Why are the meeker Australians or Canadians or even the citizens of the UK excluded from it? They’re hard to find, granted, but good people live in those lands too. So why Birmingham, Alabama and not Birmingham, England? Why a place like Woonsocket, Rhode Island and not Toronto or Melbourne or London?”
So murmur the envious hosts.
How many times have I not heard that plaint? I could say in answer to it that I have a weak spot in My vast heart for a people with My Name ever on the ready on their lips, a pious people that proclaim their trust in Me on their very currency. But I choose not to justify Myself. I elect the people I like. My ways are impenetrable. I thought everybody knew that. And, parenthetically, let it be known that I hold in special abhorrence people who strive to justify My ways to Man. The last individual who tried that on a large scale was stricken blind for his pains.
I owe no explanations. It’s that way because that’s the way it is. In other words, putting it in an even smaller nutshell and to silence the blasphemous wailers once and for all: that’s life and if you don’t like it, leave it.
But if so you do, count not on awaking After to the great good things in the Great Good Place unless it be that you boast the right citizenship and have been a paragon of proper behavior.
Proper behavior? Proper behavior? What manner of Abomination do Mine eyes now behold? Can such things transpire in the sanctity of the Reception Department of the Préfecture de Police?
Why are the Newly Arrived shamelessly bare?
And there, O, to what hideous idol is yonder kneeling naked daughter of Baal rendering deep homage, more than lip service?
The Cities of the Plain were smitten and blasted for less grave transgressions. Still another unforgivable confusion has been perpetrated by My servants. My Chief Steward, Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque, must amend this and forthwith. Laxity and slackness and negligence grow apace in the Administration.
I have long been discontented with Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque’s management. He has already received warnings. No one is indispensable in the Scheme of Things excepting, of course, Myself, creator of that Scheme. Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque can always be replaced by Sub-Prefect Antoine Marchini, able and ambitious man. Perhaps overly ambitious? Give the matter thought.
But hold! What do Mine eyes now descry?
O supreme abomination: My lower echelon servant aloft on the ladder, what doeth he? In time past a self-polluter of his ilk would have been broken with a rod of iron, dashed in pieces like a potter’s vessel, reduced to ashes in the twinkling of an eye. But, as already stated, I now command but a tithe of My glorious old puissance. Still, at whatever cost, I shall gird up My loins and commence generating chastising power.
Generating, generating.
Generating, generating.
Still generating.
A fussily-dressed scented young man bearing a pile of dossiers wanders into the vast bureaucratic room, which he hardly sees. His vision is inward as he tries for the millionth time to recall beloved faces and names out of the fog of memory. Of course he can’t, not at his modest echelon.
He halts and stares at the unusual spectacle of statue-like Arrivals, unannounced and clearly erroneously processed because stark naked. His white frozen melancholy features almost achieve a gleeful expression. Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque has slipped up again.
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There are two men, one disgustingly hairy like an ape, the other better, fairly well equipped, but nothing outstanding. There is a plain sad female with perceptible breasts.
The young man’s eyes shift from the depressing sight. They widen and widen in his white mask-like face at what he now beholds with beating heart: the most absolutely gorgeous man in creation, monopolized – lucky she! – by a kneeling vulgar female with big boobies. But here? Here? The most marvelous scandal is in the making. Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque is going to be in for it. Marvelous, marvelous, beyond words!
Generating. Generating.
Generating. Generating.
Generating process now completed.
Waxing wrathful I now summon My miserable lower-echelon servant in a voice of sky-splitting earth-shaking thunder: “Cease and desist from the sin of Onan! Desist and cease at once!”
He heeds not the Divine Voice.
He dares to persist in seed-spilling Abomination.
He shall receive the Final Warning.
In the vast bureaucratic room an attentive ear might have picked up an angry squeaking sound like that of an incensed mouse, somewhat amplified. But no ears are attentive here. The man on the ladder and the fussily dressed young man are all eyes. The ears of the four last materialized are still stopped by slumber. Maggie Williams’s ears (to mention only her ears) are stopped too, devoted as she is to closer things.
In response to those indignant squeakings the stepladder starts rocking, in the grip of some mysterious force.
The middle-aged man in the filthy beret and gray smock breaks off his rhythmic activity. He squawks and grips the crazy ladder. It grows unbearably hot. It teeters. He leaps off it and grabs the half-open drawer for salvation. The dossiers he was holding in his inactive hand flutter down like giant drab wounded butterflies. Papers scatter everywhere. Ten meters from the floor, he dangles white-wristed from the drawer. His toes drum desperately on the drawers below.
The ladder topples and crashes to the floor inches from the young man’s two-toned shoes, almost braining him. He jumps back gracefully and perceives imbecilic old Henri dangling near the ceiling. And O what else is dangling? Not at all bad for a man his age.
At the racket, doors burst open simultaneously. Dusty female lower-echelon functionaries in gray smocks gape at the disruptive things going on in the room. Aghast at the spectacle, they emit desperate little cries. Some giggle hysterically. Wringing their hands, they trot about jerkily in tiny ineffectual circles like barnyard fowl with severed heads. But their white mask-like faces express no emotion.
Another door opens. A middle-echelon female functionary with iron-gray hair done up in a big bun sweeps the scene with her frigid gray gaze. Three whistles dangle from her squat neck. Her marble-white features seem petrified into permanent sternness. She claps her hands twice. It sounds like two blocks of wood shocked together with splintering force.
“Mesdames! Mesdemoiselles! Stop this cackling immediately!”
The panicked lower-echelon female functionaries stand stock-still. The middle-echelon functionary’s voice rings out in a tone more of vengeful satisfaction than scandal:
“Absolutely no Arrivals were scheduled for this date. The fourth administrative blunder in as many months! But never as shocking as this one. Somebody will pay the piper this time. In the meantime, find decent clothing for them all, instantly! At least for the short time they will remain here.”
She points at Maggie Williams and Louis Forster who are totally lost to their surroundings.
“Those two will be voided in minutes without need for a high-level inquiry. And the others as well, I should not be greatly surprised.”
She marches over to the wall where the lower-echelon middle-aged functionary, Henri, is still suspended white-wristed from his drawer. She commands him to adjust his clothing and descend, in that order. Henri obeys his hierarchical superior but reverses the order. Using the handles of the drawers as foot and handholds, sweating abundantly, he descends with difficulty. Safely grounded, he turns his back a second on the women and then faces them again, tucked in and decently buttoned and pretexts a sudden imperious call of nature up on the ladder a minute before. No one is taken in by the excuse.
“You will be reported,” decrees the stern-faced female functionary with the iron-gray bun.
She marches over to a long gilded Empire table. It bears three telephones. One is pale gray and of conventional size. The second is much larger and deep gray. The third telephone is gigantic, requiring both hands to lift it. It is black and reposes under a vast glass bell like a giant version of the glass bell employed to protect orchids or ripe Camembert. She gives it the widest of berths. Heedless contact with the bell could have terrible consequences.
The authoritarian female functionary seizes the pale gray telephone and dials with two brief zips. She painfully manages an obsequious smile and makes deferent little bows as she recounts the scandalous blunder in the Reception Department to her hierarchical superior. The term “indescribable indecency” is recurrent.
More functionaries burst into the gigantic room.
In the meantime, with all that racket, no surprise, the remaining Four awake one by one.