They say there’s a bright tunnel, a welcoming chorus, a beaming reunion with the lost and beloved. He got the tunnel, sure, but the light was gaudy, with a little neon edge to it, as if someone had gold-leafed the sun and marked it up fifty percent. The chorus was a loop of his own applause lines, tinny and off-tempo. He had the odd sensation of dying in the middle of a sentence and arriving in the middle of a pitch. He reached instinctively for a microphone that wasn’t there and for a camera that, God help him, always was.
Then: the Gate.
No shimmering harpists, no Hallmark clouds, no bling on the The Pearly Gates. It looked like a customs checkpoint run by a Swiss bank and staffed by parish priests. The line moved with the unsentimental rhythm of a well-managed DMV. A tired, pudgy cherub stamped something behind plexiglass.
A sign in tasteful serif read, “BE NOT AFRAID, BUT BE HONEST.” Uh oh.
His name appeared over a window at the far end of the line. Behind the glass sat a bouncer with the eyes of a saint and the posture of a Marine drill instructor. Saint Peter wore a weathered fisherman’s jacket and a tie he clearly hadn’t wanted to wear. He had forearms like dock pilings and his expression of patience was that of a man who’s folded a million hook-knotted nets.
In front of him lay a ledger the size of a coffin and a tablet — an iPad, since the Lord’s IT department kept up with the times, not a hunk of stone or sheaves of papyrus.
The newcomer stepped forward and went straight to his personal brand pose; a smug smile, chin up, the salesman’s lean that narrows the distance and crowds the truth.
“Peter, baby,” he said, making the name into a deal term. “You’re looking fantastic. They tell me I’ve been very, very good for religion. Big time. Did you see the crowds? The flags? Nobody has ever been more…”
Peter raised one finger, and the space around them, without moving, started listening.
“Name?” Peter said.
“You know the name,” he said, and said it, letting it roll out with capital letters like a drumline.
Peter didn’t write it. He toggled something on the tablet. The ledger rustled as if turning its own pages. In the distance a bell rang, a ship’s bell, maybe, and the doors behind Peter stayed closed with the kind of decisiveness that made you not want to know what the hinges were attached to.
“We’ll do this like we do for everyone,” Peter said. “Simple. True or false. Stick to what you actually did. If you’re uncertain, say so. If you’re certain, be certain.”
“You’re going to love my answers,” the man said. “I have the best answers.”
“Most people don’t love their answers,” Peter said, and smiled in a way that suggested mercy is a marathon and he’s been running it for two thousand years.
Oh, sorry to break the fourth wall here, folks, but heaven does have journalists. My assignment editor Max Kolbe gave me this one, because I cover the World Leaders. Well, the former world leaders, but you get it.
It’s not quite the cigar smoke and bad coffee, clipped stenography of the press Down There, but Ailes runs a pretty hot cable channel. Fox and Fiends studios are right there on the Lake of Fire. Up here, I’m the picture a worn-out stringer standing off to the side, notebook in hand, doing the Afterlife Beat. That’s me. My press credentials are get invited to the weirdest press avails, here and … Down There.
Today’s event was a classic: the money was on a quick Audit and the Down Escalator for … that guy.
For the record, the Gate never cared for spin. The excuses people make, I swear.
“Let’s begin with promises,” Peter said.
The tablet glowed and formed a stack: Forty, then a hundred, then a rain of paper-thin layers that fluttered in the air like falling leaves. Each one contained a promise, a vow, a never. The subject caught at them as if they were autographs. They slipped through his hands.
“I made a lot of promises,” he said, struck into honesty by the display, “.. .and they loved it. The ratings were amazing. No one ever complained. Well, a couple losers, maybe.”
Peter tapped the ledger. “The Boss doesn’t care about ratings,” he said, and his voice had in it the flat slap of oars on a morning lake.
“Everyone love ratings. We had the best economy. I was the best President. I made America Great Again. Phenomenal. So hot.”
At “so hot” there was a titter from some junior clerks somewhere behind Peter, who rewarded it with a baleful glance.
“You had a fortunate handful, a few thousand … and a desperate mass. You seemed to spend more time enriching yourself,” Peter said, glancing at the tablet. “Were you briefed on the whole eye of the needle parable?”
“Who cares? Everyone does it? I deserved it. I was strong. Everyone loved me.”
“You thought the absence of shame was strength. That is a common error.”
“I made America respected.”
“You made America a spectacle,” Peter said. “Respect and voyeurism are not the same currency.”
The man’s smile tightened. He looked for a camera again and found only the kind of attention he had seen in courtrooms.
Peter went on. “We measure certain things with words you don’t like to say. We measure cruelty, indifference, vanity, theft, lies, and the manipulation with other people’s darkest instincts. We measure how you used fear. We measure how often you treated people who trusted you like marks. We measure the lives lost before their time, and the suffering caused.”
He gestured to the tablet. “This is called an examination of conscience. Most people do it before they arrive. You preferred to do it as a spectacle, which is your way, and so we’re doing this in front of whoever is listening.”
He looked at me briefly. I looked at my notebook.
The man bristled. He was sure he could talk his way past a fisherman, not realizing that this fisherman had millennia of patience.
“Look,” he said, “I know this game. You’re going to tell me I wasn’t perfect. Fine. Nobody is perfect. But I did a lot of good for a lot of people. The people loved me. They adored me. And the ones who didn’t? Not important people. Real scum. The worst. So many people followed me. The biggest follower counts.”
Peter smiled sadly. “The Beatitudes did not include a clause about follower counts.”
The man tried again. “I get it. This is rigged. Rigged against me.”
Peter, perhaps displaying the slightest crease in his forehead stopped the man before the “rigged” dialogue could build up a head of steam.
“All your choices decided this moment, Mr. President.”
“Mr. President? Good. Showing respect for the best President ever. OK,” he said. “So what’s the move? Purgatory? I do a week, tops. The Big Guy checks out how much my followers love me. I make a few calls, and then we see about the big suite.”
Peter leaned forward, and for the first time, there was iron. “You’ve mistaken Heaven for a resort property.”
It’s not that Heaven is humorless. Heaven laughs a lot, but usually when someone has the humility to wear a ridiculous hat or a red nose to make a sick child smile. What Heaven doesn’t do is clap on cue.
Peter gestured, and a smaller figure emerged from the line of clerks beyond the desk. She had librarian glasses and the energy of a tax attorney who also teaches a kindergarten class of hyperactive children. She carried a basket. Inside were small, square stones with words carved into them: mercy, justice, truth, vanity, cruelty, pride, repentance.
“Pick one,” Peter said.
“Like a game?”
“Like the opposite of a game.”
He reached for Mercy, then hovered, twitching toward Pride with the reflexive muscle memory of a man picking a tie his mistress said looked good on him.
The clerk, bless her, nudged Truth a little closer, as if the universe might, for once, be easy. He selected Vanity and held it up, grin reinstalled, because branding always did his thinking for him.
“Of course,” Peter said, with the sadness people use when the lesson could have been learned a million small times and arrives at last as a boulder. “Vanity. The mirror you never looked through.”
“Great stone,” the man said, waiting for applause that would never arrive here. “Very solid. Classic. The best. People will say no one ever made a better pick.”
“Wormwood?” a voice purred, very near and very far, as if coming from the hinge of the universe. A bureaucratic shiver went through the room, an inter-office memo composed of sulfur and euphony.
A parchment appeared at my elbow, because I’m on the disto; I’m media accredited Above and Below, you know. The header read:
INFERNAL MEMORANDUM
From: Screwtape, Undersecretary for Opportunistic Sin, Department of Triumphal Self-Delusion
To: Wormwood (junior-grade tempter, now promoted, pending completion of remedial patience training)
Re: Arrival of Subject ORANGE (aliases numerous; narrative gravity immense; self-delusion industrial)
Summary: Our client has chosen Vanity. This is good. Vanity is the hinge on which he swings, and on which, when properly weighted, the whole door falls. Coordinate with Logistics to ensure that the corridor from the Gate to the Pit includes mirrors, applause indicators, and a carefully curated audience of sycophants who are, in fact, empty chairs. We want him to feel at home while becoming aware, very slowly, that there is no home. Remember: Hell is not a place of honest fire; it is the green room for a Fox show that never starts.
P.S. Anticipate requests for legal counsel. Channel all calls to Roy Cohn. He is otherwise engaged.
The parchment curled into a cigarette and smoked itself.
Peter closed his ledger. His face had the tired kindness of a man who has delivered bad news gently for twenty centuries and still believes in people who take it well.
“I have to be clear,” he said. “This is not judgment. This is triage. Judgment comes when you stop selling the product of yourself and start telling the truth of yourself. Until then, you’ll be more properly situated where the atmosphere fits you.”
The man blinked. There was a spark, just there, a microscopic curiosity about this idea of truth. He reached toward it like a cat pawing a laser dot.
“Truth,” he repeated, tasting the word. “I had a truth. My truth. The best truth.”
Peter nodded, as if to say: I tried. “Take the escalator,” he said, gently. “It’s the one going down.”
If you were alive in the years of our discontent and television, you remember the escalator. The down escalator is quieter. The handrail is sticky. The brass is tarnished no matter how often it’s polished, which is always. Muzak doesn’t play a song so much as an approximation of a feeling of anxiety you once had.
He stepped on. A faint wind rose, the kind found in hotels that brag about their HVAC. The mirrors began.
At first they were the flattering kind, the filters, the angles where the jowls pull back and the eyes look like a comeback speech. Then the mirrors became honest, then cruel, then simply factual. He smiled, then scowled, then reached for a smile again and found that it had become heavy.
The escalator opened into a lobby every American has visited in a nightmare: chandeliers that try too hard, columns that are really drywall, carpeting so busy it induces vertigo. The air smelled like warm batteries and stale praise.
A bellhop appeared: sharp suit, devil’s eyes, name tag reading: SCREWTAPE.
“Welcome,” he said, with the soothing hospitality of an executive who fires people with a hug. “We’ve been expecting you since you were nine.”
“Who are you?” the man said, adjusting himself into a posture that demanded surrender.
“A fan,” Screwtape said. “And a financier. We underwrote your appetites at a very favorable rate.”
They walked together down a corridor where media screens showed highlights of his life, but not the highlight reel he would have cut. These were the raw tapes: The small cruelties, the unforced errors, the women crying in pain and fear, the moments that stained and never washed out. He quickened his pace past those, wanting the rallies, the crowds, the glow.
Screwtape obliged. A door opened. The crowd roared.
He stepped into a hall beyond gaudy, a coliseum of low standards. There were banners bearing his name, sparkling letters draped like tinsel over a landfill. The podium was there, the teleprompter lit. The crowd shimmered, faces luminous, arms raised.
He basked. He drank it in like oxygen spiked with sugar and concentrated dopamine.
“Beautiful,” he whispered.
“Isn’t it?” Screwtape said. “And yours forever. One small condition.”
“What condition?”
“Speak,” Screwtape purred. “Say whatever you like. Tell them you were always right, are always right, will always be right. All we ask is that you tell the truth while you do it.”
The man laughed. It was not a good sound. “The truth is I won. I was a winner.”
“Say it,” Screwtape said.
“I won,” he said.
A sliver of heat ran across his tongue, barely noticeable, like the first sip of cheap whiskey. The crowd applauded but with a half-second latency.
“Again,” Screwtape said. “And then tell them about the time you were generous to someone who couldn’t repay you.”
“I was generous …” The heat spiked, a child’s game becoming a dentist’s drill. He stopped.
Screwtape smiled and gestured. The teleprompter’s glass turned to mirror. In it, the hall’s crowd flickered and revealed itself for what it was: a constellation of empty chairs and a dozen bored demons holding applause signs with the lassitude of bored ushers.
“You’ll get used to it,” Screwtape said. “Eventually, your tongue acclimates. Or it doesn’t. Eternity makes both options interesting.”
The man, for perhaps the first time in the history of his face, looked uncertain.
“We do have alternatives,” Screwtape said, cheerfully. “You could do the Interview Circuit.”
“The what? That sounds right up my alley?”
“We set up a panel,” Screwtape said, sweeping his hand. “You sit with … interesting guests. We roll tape on every decision you made when a smaller person would have chosen kindness but you chose spectacle. You explain. As long as you tell the truth, the tongue cools. Lie, and…”
“Let me guess,” the man muttered, the way he always did when the punchline wasn’t his. “Heat.”
Screwtape inclined his head. “Every kingdom has its physics.”
The doors opened onto a studio made of all the green rooms in all the world. On the panel sat faces of people he’d hurt, lives he’d destroyed, the toll of a long life of destruction you’d bury under an avalanche of denial if you could. A woman from a hospital, the marks of a respirator around her face. A man from a hurricane’s ruin. A kid with a bullet-perforated backpack and a face like someone who learned early that grown-ups lie.
He didn’t sit. He looked to Screwtape. “I want my lawyer.”
“You had a good one,” Screwtape said gently. “Two, in fact. They’re very busy. The phones down here never stop. Roy Cohn can see you in … oh, that’s unfortunate …87,032 years.”
He tried a new tactic. “Peter didn’t even let me explain. That’s not fair. I demand the Supreme Court.”
“Our Supreme Court is very old and very bored,” Screwtape said. “They only take cases where someone attempted mercy and failed.”
“What about Clarence Thomas? He’s on it, right?”
Screwtape smiled again, “Oh, no sir. He’s … assigned elsewhere.”
“Well, I still want a hearing. I’ve got full immunity.”
You had full immunity, sir. Until you attempt mercy and accountability, my hands are tied.”
“Attempt?” he sneered. “I did mercy when it mattered to me.”
“There it is,” Screwtape said, almost fond. “Your favorite pronoun.”
He turned and walked away from the studio, as if the act of leaving could alter the physics of consequence. The halls echoed with the soft laughter of punished vanity.
You want the black comedy? Here’s black comedy: Hell’s hottest room is the one that looks exactly like the Press Room in the House he occupied for eight years. There’s a TelePrompTer, two flags, a seal that suggests an eagle who never learned to fly. The media in this press room does our jobs on thermally resistant pads. It’s the Roast that never ends and never lands. We never ask an easy question and lies get … well, you know … punished.
He did the Infernal Media circuit. He warmed to it, because he could warm to anything that let him talk at length about himself. But the tongue heat kept intruding. He tried punchlines, nicknames, the old alliterative sneers, and each time the sting returned, a reminder that words were a kind of sacrament he had vandalized.
Between sets he wandered the corridors like a ghost in his own museum. He found a door he hadn’t tried and opened it on a quiet chapel. No cameras, no mirrors. A bench. A book with a soft leather cover, pages that smelled like rain and library and the inside of forgiveness.
He put a hand on it as if it might bite. The title embossed in small letters: CONFESSION.
He picked it up. He put it down. He walked out. In the hallway Screwtape leaned against a mirror and looked pleased with the inventory.
“You could try it,” Screwtape said conversationally. “People do. Even here. Especially here. The upper management hates it when we lose one, but the quota’s not binding.”
“Confession is for losers,” the man said.
Screwtape’s grin was something like pity and something like a real estate agent about to close on a house with crime tape on the door. “That’s the brand talking,” he said. “You stick with it, sir.”
Sometimes, down in the pit’s side streets, the ones that look like K Street collapsed into Times Square and got sold to a hedge fund, you see the Fallen at leisure. They are their own company. They tell jokes about the old days. They reminisce about the time they convinced a nation that cruelty was strength and lying was loyalty. They loved a deal where they took advantage of the old, the slow, the sick, the exhausted. They trade metaphors like baseball cards: the frog and the pot, the slow boiling, the trick. The trick is always the same: take a sin, rename it, sell it back as a virtue, a rebrand that never ends and never sells.
They are also all submerged to their necks in fiery ichor, screaming in endless torment.
Our subject tried at first to move among them like a once-great lounge act among retired pickpockets. He tried to hold court. He tried to build a coalition. He tried to announce a run for something. They seemed unable to see him at all. Some of them had paid him millions in the other life. Now, he wasn’t even a ghost to them.
It rankled.
Hell let him try. Hell lets you do anything except be loved or rest from the knowledge of your sins.
At some point (time is strange there), Peter sent a note down, because the saints are softies. It arrived as a folded napkin from a seaside café.
Donald,
The Book is still in the chapel. Doors don’t lock here the way you think. Mercy is not a trick. It is a gift, but it can’t be carried in someone else’s hands.
P.
The man read it. He folded it again. He used it to blot his forehead. It came back gray and grease-stained. He handed it to an aide who wasn’t there.
Another memo arrived, smoking at the edges:
INFERNAL MEMORANDUM
From: Screwtape
To: Wormwood
Re: Adjustments to the Program
It has come to my attention that Subject ORANGE is, paradoxically, more tormented by the proximity of redemption than by its absence. Increase the density of chapels by twenty percent. Place one at the exit of every studio. Let the hymn drift under the door: not the grand hymns, but the silly ones, the ones children sing, the ones with hand motions.
Also, ensure the mirrors show, at random intervals, the faces of those who would forgive him if he asked. (Our legal department assures me this is allowed under the Consent Decrees of A.D. 33.)
Note: Do not remove the crowds. Remove instead the feedback. Let him speak to silence and expressionless faces. It is a subtler blade.
Screwtape, like the true professional, never underestimates the slow burn of irony.
By now you’re asking, Does anyone change here? Do the mighty confess? Do they put down the stones they picked so carefully and choose the one with the rough little word that saves them?
Sometimes, yes. Rarely. So very rarely. I’ve seen men like him sit in the chapel and not combust. I’ve seen the book take a weight out of a man the way the tide takes a yacht off a sandbar. I’ve seen Screwtape curse paperwork for months afterward.
But our subject? He drifts through his circuits like a weather pattern. He likes the studio with the flags. He tolerates the panel, thinking proximity to him will make their condemnations stop. He falls for it, every time. He avoids the chapel the way a losing gambler avoids his bookie.
He tried, once, a halfway thing. He went in. He sat. He opened the book with two fingers as if it would slam shut on him. He read the first page: small mercies, small apologies. He read the line about loving your neighbor and laughed, to prove he wasn’t taking this seriously.
He made it halfway through a sentence that began with “I am sorry…” and the lights in the chapel warmed, the air shifted, something moved like a curtain stirred by the earliest morning wind.
He snapped it shut like a trap. He looked around in case anyone had seen. Only we had, and we don’t count.
He stood. He smoothed his tie. He went back to the green room.
If there’s a moral, it’s not one of those sugarcoated parables you can embroider on an apron. Hell, if you’re doing it right, is not what happens to you. Hell is what you keep making.
He rides the down escalator every day, a man committed to the bit. He gives speeches to ghosts who never clap, never cheer, never smile. There is no adoration, just pain. He names his old enemies and is given glimpses of them in Heaven, and some still on Earth. With his passing, their lives returned to the sweet gravities of home and family and loved ones.
Peter keeps the ledger. He doesn’t gloat. He waits. Mercy’s a stalker with excellent boundaries. She keeps showing up to the place you’ll be next, smiling, checking her watch. It’s irritating, if you’re opposed to it.
The last thing I see in that hall, when I’m done for the day and I punch out, head upstairs, and go to my favorite bar where the bartender is a retired martyr, the drinks are strong, and the music is good. Peter’s there, drinking a retsina.
“Well, friend? Did you hear he wants to speak to the management?”
I looked up, “The Big Guy?”
Peter pointed down, “The other guy.”
“Huh. That’s a story.” I muttered.
“The Other Guy already complained how much server time Donald is taking up. I don’t think he takes the meeting. I mean, even he has standards.”
We watched on the monitor over the bar as Donald tried again to convince the audience to smile, to connect, to end his pain by giving him the adulation and attention he needs. It doesn’t work. It never will.
His latest speech peters out, stutters to a stop, all his energy gone, and for one microsecond he catches his own eye in the teleprompter, not as he imagines it, but as it is, old and rheumy and dissipated. There’s sweat. There’s fear. There’s the boy who learned early that love and applause would never fill the gap of parents who hated him, and themselves.
Then he blinks, brand reinstalled, and we go again.
Ask me whether saints pray for men who built themselves out of plaster and TV light. Ask whether they pray even for the corrupt and the cruel.
They do. It irritates Hell’s middle-management, something awful.
But some are unreachable by any mercy.
The Big Man watches it all, weighs it all. And Donald will never leave this place.
He’s down there, explaining to no one, forever. The green rooms hum with the promise of a good hit, a promise that is never fulfilled. The teleprompter scrolls too fast, too slow. The applause sign flickers like a heartbeat on a dying monitor to silence and pain. He lifts his hands. He leans. He begins. He burns. He suffers like no one in Hell has suffered before.
Every speech, every day to those empty, expressionless faces.
Hoping someday you can retire your Trump anthropologist burden and just write fiction. This was golden.
Rick, you really have range! Well done.