SEVEN
“Okay, so, Jennifer Palmer. First candidate for parole. She’s been here . . .” I tried to remember. Failed. There were a lot of people to keep track of. I figured I knew a hundred souls by name at this point. A hundred out of billions.
“Thirty-one years,” Cathie said. “On food court duty where she slings Orange Juliuses. Juliuses? That doesn’t sound right. Julius-ii?”
“It sure doesn’t, the poor dope,” the Ant murmured, because she thought Orange Juliuses tasted like ass, and a job serving them appropriately hellish.
“I need a . . .” And poof! Except without any noise, and now I was holding my HelltabletTM, patent pending. I used to walk around with a magical clipboard, until I remembered it was the twenty-first century. So I converted my clipboard. Like everything here, it was a symbol to help me grasp the abstract. I mean, Hell didn’t really look like the Mall of America. And I wasn’t really holding a tablet. It was just the best way I could wrap my brain around the whole thing.
My HelltabletTM held any info I needed on anyone here. It was also waterproof. And fireproof. Nobody could read it but me. And I never had to charge it. Or maybe I was constantly charging it—I might be its battery. It always worked, was my point. Plus it perpetuated the illusion that I knew what I was doing. That was always valuable.
“Okay, yeah. We assigned what’s-her-face as her buddy.” Yes! One of the first things we’d implemented: the buddy system. No more did the damned have to suffer an afterlife filled with torture and not have any idea what was going on or where they were or where the bathrooms were or if you even needed bathrooms anymore. Now you had a buddy who would show you the ropes during your years of torment. “You know, the girl Lawrence the Vampire helped bring up.”
“Cindy—”
“Tinsman!” I shouted after sneaking a peek at my HelltabletTM. “The cheerleader turned vampire turned resident of Hell.” And her father was one of the reasons life up top was so chaotic right now. (Argh, it wasn’t “up top.” We weren’t below anything! Was I gonna have to put the MoA on top of a cloud so we all stopped referring to Hell as down below? And why did it bug me so much?)
“Okay, so . . . why her?” When Marc and I both looked at the Ant, she put her hands out in a “whoa, hear me out” gesture. “Whoa, hear me out.” (See?) “I think your parole plan is incredibly innovative.”
“Oh.” Um. A compliment from the Ant. I had no idea what to do. Where to look. What to do with my hands. Everything: blank and frozen. Was she mentally preparing herself to lose the bet? Getting in practice? I didn’t think I could handle three of those a day from her. “Thanks.”
“Insane, and bound to cause problems, but it’s a new idea, and in Hell, that’s rare.” Whew! Now we were back on familiar passive-aggressive territory. “I mean . . . this place has always been in the business of punishing people and keeping them. You’re talking about doing the opposite—no punishment, and letting some of them go. So why Jennifer Palmer? Because if I know why you picked her, we’ll—your committee—we’ll have a better chance of recommending people you think should get out. Time-saver, get it?”
“Yep.”
“So why this one?”
Because we had to start somewhere. And she was one of the first people I got to know here. Her story made me feel bad, which, in this place? Was a good trick.
* * *
“If you didn’t have to be here, where would you go?”*
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“Well, think about it.” I sucked up Julius and waited. I was as patient as a mannequin: unmoving, blank faced, and dressed in trendy clothes. Finally . . .
“I guess I’d go home. Tell them I’m sorry. Tell them the whole story. My folks are still alive, my sister, and he is, too.”
“Oh yeah?”
“The fire was an accident, but they thought it was on purpose.” Definitely warming to her subject, no pun intended. The side ponytail bounced as she gestured. “I couldn’t tell anybody . . . I mean . . . Tammy died.” Bounce. “All because I wasn’t paying attention, y’know?” I didn’t, but nodded anyway. “They thought it was on purpose and I couldn’t— Someone went to prison for it. I could’ve said something. I didn’t. I was,” she summed up, shaking her head so the bouncing turned to swaying, “chickenshit.”
“And not surprised to find yourself in Hell.”
“Suicides go to Hell,” was the flat response. As if catching her mood, the ponytail went still. “So no. I wasn’t surprised.”
“Okay.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Why didn’t you know that?”
“I could’ve gotten the info. I wanted to hear what you have to say.”
“Oh.” She paused. Swallowed. Then, in a small voice, and with a smaller smile: “Thanks.”
“Sure.” Aww. She was sweet, for an accidental murderous arsonist who watched an innocent man go to prison while never saying a word for fear of incriminating herself. And it wasn’t her fault she died on a terrible hair day. Oh. Wait. It was. Well, no one was perfect.
* * *
“She did something awful—and she’s paid for it, every day, for three decades. She’s exactly the type of person I want to try parole out on. What purpose is served by keeping her here? What is she going to learn, or unlearn, or think about, that hasn’t happened in thirty-one years?”
Nods all around—which didn’t happen as often as you might think. Maybe in our kitchen at home, if I talked everyone into more strawberries in the smoothies, and less blackberries (they were all seed!).
But we were all on board with the parole plan, and not just because the original Satan fucking hated it. Although that alone would have been a good reason to go for it. She’d hated my plans for a newer, gentler Hell so much that she took another form and undermined me all over the place. She wasn’t even clever about it, at the end. The really sad part? That wasn’t the first time I got the drop on her. And when a shoe-obsessed former administrative assistant who flunked out of college can fool the devil? Time for new management.
I just hadn’t thought it’d be me.
“I think it’s great,” Marc said. “Man, the first time I saw a kid getting dismembered and fed to bears— Y’know that’s the first time I’ve thrown up since med school? Fucking bears.”
We all had nightmare stories to share that none of us were going to share. But it’s why I started thinking about the people I wanted out of Hell. The kids, obviously, and the sooner the better. The children who’d gone to Hell because they thought they deserved it—they were the first ones I wanted out. Of course, most of them weren’t children anymore. There had been a pair of twins—brother and sister—who yelled at their mother and then went off and fell through the ice and drowned and woke up in Hell because they’d broken the fifth—fourth?—commandment.
And they never questioned it. Never once. In two hundred years. They’ve been drowning over and over again, reliving their last day as first graders for centuries, and for what?
So in my first few weeks I rounded up the ones who wanted to leave, the ones I agreed could leave, and we had the Talk: “I don’t know how this is going to go. This is all new to me. I don’t know what’ll happen when you leave here. I’m just saying you can go, if you want.”
“Where?” one of them finally asked, one small question out of the sea of bewildered faces.
“Wherever. You ended up here for whatever reason because you willed yourself here. Now you can will yourself somewhere else. Back to earth? Up to Heaven? Argh, not up. Or maybe you just want to fade away . . . I don’t know. I don’t.” I threw up my hands. “My point is, it’s up to you now.”
Now, I wasn’t expecting a parade. But a few thank-yous, maybe? Sure. Alas: I’d set that bar unreasonably high.
A few left, gone who knew where. Most stayed. It took me the better part of the week to figure out why: They thought it was a trick. Or a trap. Nothing had changed here in forever, and all of a sudden there was a new devil and she was telling some of the people they could leave anytime they liked, no strings attached, nothing to worry about, certainly not a hidden agenda, so just go already, what’s stopping you?
Yeah, when you put it like that, I guess I’d have trouble believing it, too.
I also explained that those who didn’t want to leave were welcome to stay as long as they liked, and they didn’t have to be punished anymore. It was all minor shit, absolutely nothing worth an eternity of torture. There were kids who’d stolen candy bars; there were women who’d cheated on their husbands; there were men who’d coveted their neighbor’s homesteads: Fly, be free! Or at least stop putting up with torture.
Don’t get me wrong: the baddies weren’t going anywhere. Dahmer needed to stay right where he was. So did Elizabeth Báthory and Walter Disney.
(You want to hear something that makes no sense? Hitler wasn’t here. Why the hell was Hitler not in Hell?)
But the ones who wanted to stay? Some of them partnered up, and even formed little groups, and went off into Hell and set up their own living situations that weren’t eternal torture. There were whole apartment complexes starting where the parking lot would have been in the real MoA. The duplexes of the damned, Marc called them.
Cathie pulled me back to the meeting with a gentle kick to my ankle. “But you don’t want Jennifer Palmer to just gallop gaily off into the sunset, right?”
“Right. No gay galloping. I mean, she really did do something bad; she’s not like the little kids. So she can leave, but she has to do what she can to make amends back in the real world. And for that we need Lawrence and Cindy.” I paused. “Well, just Cindy, but I have to talk to Lawrence about vampire stuff anyway.”
“Getting ready for a new TV interview?” the Ant asked with a smirk. “Figured you’d get the opinion of a vamp who doesn’t adore you this time?”
I shuddered. “Noooooo. To both of those things.” Then, louder, “I want Lawrence. Right now.”
And there he was. It was just that easy. I read somewhere that Hell is other people. The writer got it wrong . . . Hell is me, mostly.