Golden Ticket
Back in the way station of the afterlife, mid-Atlantic region, Harold the Help Desk Angel waves her to the front of the line. “Miss Winters!” he greets her. “I’m glad we could get that little mix-up sorted out for you. In just a moment, we’ll have you on your way to your Destination.”
Jennie is too drained to give much of a damn. “Whatever you say.”
“Ticket, please.”
Jennie reaches inside the jacket that pops into being as she reaches inside it.
And dammit, there is no goddamn ticket inside the damned thing.
She relates this to Harold rather tersely.
“Oh, dear.” He pounds a few frantic keystrokes. In the time that has elapsed since Jennie’s last visit to the way station, he has replaced the broken keyboard; this one has all its keys still attached. “Oh, dear. Erm,” he says, glancing at the increasingly impatient line, “I’ll be back with you in just a moment.”
He makes a clumsy escape from his swivel chair, knocking it over as he stands. He is gone for something like a few minutes.
He returns with another heavenly being; it takes Jennie a moment to realize this is Rupert. His face is doing the blinding-light thing again. “Jeanette,” he greets her, “I’ll need you to come with me.”
Stunned, she follows him into his office, which looks like a regular office; the wall concealing the terrifying white Void is in place. The chairs this time are simple folding chairs, and Jennie feels she certainly deserves the recliner after all this. “I think,” Rupert says, “you had better take a seat.”
She reluctantly takes his advice, and a seat.
“There has been,” Rupert says, “a bit of a complication.”
“Clearly.” Jennie is losing patience with her heavenly host.
“You will recall,” Rupert begins with what sounds like great trepidation, “the details I supplied regarding the evaluation process before we commenced.”
He pauses, waiting for something. She nods.
“Specifically, I informed you that knowing you were being evaluated gave you an advantage over living persons, and that the righteousness quotient required to gain admission into the almost-certainly-more-desirable Destination would be adjusted to compensate for this advantage.”
After brief interval she nods again.
“Well,” Rupert says, “your new score has been calculated.”
“And?”
“And,” Rupert continues, “the improvement in your righteousness quotient is precisely equal to that adjustment in score.”
Jennie gapes.
“Meaning,” he says finally, “that your status is once again inconclusive.”
Jennie takes a long moment to consider this before arriving at what she decides is a measured and reasonable response. She stands, calmly folds her chair—
“I’m afraid this creates quite a bit of a problem…”
—and brings it crashing down over Rupert’s head. She storms into the lobby yelling the fiercest blasphemies she can summon to mind. In her deeply distressed state, her summoning-to-mind powers are not at their peak, so these consist mostly of “God is so dumb!”
“What do you imagine this will accomplish?” Rupert asks when he emerges.
“I’m right on the brink, right?” she raves. “I figured I’d give you bastards some help in deciding where to put me!” She tries to kick over one of the seats in the waiting area; it is bolted to the floor. There are surprisingly few targets for vandalism in the lobby.
“I’m sorry to inform you,” he says, “that nothing you do in this space is factored into your judgment.” Powerless, Jennie resorts to fuming.
“As I was saying before your unceremonious exit from my office, this situation creates for us a rather serious problem in that there is no precedent for it, and thus no protocol. As I told you before, it’s a veritable nightmare getting anything done if there’s no precedent.”
Jennie continues to fume.
“I will be filing a report to Western Hemisphere management straightaway. However, it might be some time before the issue is resolved.”
She decides she can speak and fume at the same time, for the sake of expediency. “And by ‘some time,’ you mean…?”
“Four to six decades,” comes the reply, “assuming the issue needn’t go any higher up than the Western Hemisphere office. If you like,” Rupert says with a motion toward the chair Jennie failed to kick over, “you can wait right here.”
Perhaps, she reflects, fuming is best done in silence.
“Or,” he says finally, “I can suspend you in a state of blissful unconscious until the situation is resolved.”
She figures she had better respond to that, given that the alternative is four to six decades of twenty-four-hour cable news. “Tell me more about this blissful unconscious.”
“The best way to describe it to a being of your mental capacity would be to say it is like dozing off in a warm bath. There is no risk of drowning, seeing as you’re already deceased.”
“Blissful unconscious,” she says again. “I’ll take it. And Rupert?”
She looks at Rupert the Dominion’s professor suit and blank glowing face. She looks at Harold the Help Desk Angel, pounding away at his keyboard. She looks at Wolf Blitzer and catches him in mid-stutter as the HD feed chokes.
“No big deal if, you know, you guys forget to wake me up.”
On Doubt
While writing my novel Mongrel, the follow-up to Stray (2015 Editor's note: coming within the next four to six decades!), I came to terms with the difference between the heroes and villains, such as there are, in my writing. That difference is certainty.
Namely, my antagonists’ certainty in their beliefs drives them to extremes. My most sympathetic characters question their beliefs, and that process of questioning opens opportunities for learning, for growth, for betterment, for beauty and grace.
A popular paraphrasing the quote by Bertrand Russell laments that “that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts.” I think, however, that this is by design.
Few things can survive without doubt, least of all faith. Faith in the absence of doubt is mere presumption.
Doubt is the refining fire.
Doubt is the abiding ache.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Justin Livi, Michaela Brown, Amanda Gosling, and Sean Underwood, as well as Dr. Sharon White, for invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this story. Dr. White noted that some of the dialogues struck her as unbelievable or overly formal for a group of young adults' casual conversation at a bar. I take that to mean I keep strange company.
Thanks again to Michaela and to Sean for letting me pillage their personages for use in the story. “Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental” is always a lie.
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