Paradise - A Divine Comedy

by Glenn Myers

Everything you believe is wrong

  Sleep. Dome. No intruders. Bikinis. Better.

  ‘Right,’ said Leopold, the next morning. ‘It’s time to talk some sense.’

  I’d offered to be host, because it gave me an excuse to re-create one of the great life experiences: the all-you-can-eat hotel breakfast. This particular meal bore a resemblance to the buffet at the New Directions in Public Service Web Administration conference that I’d attended (at my own expense) in Frankfurt the previous November, part of my plan to give my contact at the hospital the ammunition she needed to persuade her boss to come up with the budget to keep me on.

  The organizers had been wise enough to lay on an extravagant junket to make up for the lack of content in the conference itself. That, they guessed rightly, would draw in the punters. I had missed the morning plenary two days in a row due to needing a lie-down.

  Keziah took a bowl of fresh fruit. I started with that, plus cereal (got to look after yourself, even when dead), then planned a route through the sausages, bacon, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, potato wedges and eggs, finishing in the croissants and chocolate-bread. Leopold wasn’t eating, having confessed in a petulant moment of self-disclosure that he’d suffered from severe dyspepsia since at least the Ice-Age-before-last.

  ‘I’m not sure you realize how lucky you are to have us working with you,’ said Leopold.

  ‘I’m sure we don’t,’ I replied, looking down with a humble and serious expression. Across the table from me, Keziah had tuned out.

  ‘It’s yourselves that suffer in the long run,’ he said.

  ‘OK,’ I said carefully. ‘What do you want us to do?’

  ‘We need you happy and normal,’ said Leopold. ‘A couple. Home. Garden. Some routine to life. An occupation. The basics. That’s the start.

  ‘Then you go forth and multiply.’

  ‘We what?’ I said, dropping a German sausage.

  ‘He wants us to breed,’ said Keziah with a sigh.

  ‘We can’t,’ I gasped, after a long moment while I fully grasped this point about breeding and then a further moment which I spent becoming aghast. ‘Can we? You know. Even if we wanted to. Which I don’t. With all due respect.’

  Otherwise, why would I have been playing fantasy cricket matches and creating restaurants? A series of experiments had already underlined the point. Everything seemed to be present and correct up here, but nothing worked.

  ‘You refer to the Chastity of the Heavens,’ said the Lord. ‘It’s true. None of us can.’

  ‘Why is that, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Why? It is one of the mysteries of the universe that even we spirits haven’t totally fathomed yet.’ Leopold gave a bitter little twitch. ‘Of course some spirits claim to know. Some spirits float around with smirks on their faces saying, “Just wait for the Great Consummation.” But they don’t know. They can’t know.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘Meanwhile on earth’—he spat the word out—‘two fish or pathetic little insects or even plants—plants I ask you—dandelions! Japanese knot-weed!—can multiply sexually at the drop of a hat and flower and be fulfilled whereas here in the heavens beings like us—great beings, superior beings—can have all the urges and desires and even the equipment but somewhere deep down there’s some missing piece. It’s stressful, I can tell you. You don’t know what stress is. Thirteen thousand eight hundred and nineteen million, four hundred and twenty-three thousand, six hundred and nine years, two months and twenty-four days, earth time, and still I haven’t, not really—And we’re all growing old and you wonder sometimes what is the point. What kind of malicious beast would create us… Excuse me.’

  He rushed out of the restaurant, squeezing the sides of his head.

  Bumping and banging sounds came from the men’s room. I retrieved the German sausage and took an invigorating mouthful, then another. Keziah spooned in a couple of grapes and some shredded grapefruit, neat as a cat.

  Leopold crashed back in, smoothing his clothes. ‘We are fine about it, actually, and what we mean by multiply is build a world together. You’ve got all your memories here. Mix and match them. You’ve got your imaginations. Be inventive. You can build a whole world. You can even create new people, mashups from friends you know. A whole beautiful world.’

  ‘So really you’re talking about making a fantasy world by combining own memories?’ I asked.

  ‘Paradise,’ said Leopold. ‘The start, maybe, of a whole new way of being human.’

  ‘I have a slight problem with that,’ I offered. ‘What if we’re incompatible?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ returned Leopold. ‘Look, name me a creation myth from your planet—and I should know because I wrote some of them—where the hypothetical first Father and first Mother say to their Creator, “sorry, no can do, we just don’t belong together”?’

  ‘Technically that doesn’t prove anything,’ I pointed out. ‘Obviously, if a primaeval pair didn’t get on, they wouldn’t reproduce, and the Creator would have to try again with someone else. There might have been dozens of primaeval pairs that never made it. Only the winners get to be in the Creation Myth. It’s natural selection…’

  Leopold was not looking amused.

  ‘To be sure of success,’ I said, emolliently, ‘we need our own time and space. It’s not like we haven’t been busy already. You must have seen my Lord’s Cricket Ground and Edwards Air Force Base and Osama’s and all the miles of coastline. This restaurant.’

  ‘No-one’s really interested in that,’ said Leopold. ‘It’s the life you build together—the life we train you to build—that’s what matters. That’s where true happiness lies. I thought we’d explained that.’

  ‘All the better to let it develop slowly and naturally, then,’ I said. ‘If Keziah and me are going to spend eternity together, er, we need to have plenty of time to get used to the idea.’

  Leopold looked uncertain. ‘I suppose we should listen to what our pets are telling us. It adds to the pressure on me though.’

  ‘Gaston doesn’t approve?’ I hazarded.

  ‘Never mind what Gaston thinks. I’m not his slave. I’m the expert animal trainer. I dictate the pace.’

  ‘So I’m sure you’ll do what’s right then,’ I said smoothly.

  ‘Hmph,’ said Leopold. ‘Look. I’m prepared to work with you in the mornings and give you the afternoons to—’

  ‘Adjust and acclimatize,’ I suggested. ‘To our new lives.’

  ‘Very well. But we’re still going to have our first training meeting today. Meet me in the centre of the habitat in half an hour.’ He left.

  After the door banged, I looked at Keziah.

  ‘Well?’

  Keziah sighed.

  ‘I think there might be something in going along with him a little,’ she said.

  ‘I’m glad you’re seeing sense.’

  ‘I don’t care whether I die or live,’ she said quietly. ‘But I’ve started building something in my habitat. I want to see how all my memories and feelings fit together.’

  I thought of the people being burnt alive, the gallows, the razor blades.

  ‘How do you know they do all fit together? Aren’t they just randomly—’

  ‘I see something in my sleep,’ she said. ‘I want to build it.’

  ‘That’s interesting. I see something in my sleep,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want to build it exactly, though.’

  ‘So I need time and space,’ continued Keziah.

  ‘I get it,’ I said slowly. ‘Gaston and Leopold want us to have a relationship. You want to understand yourself or bring closure or something.’

  ‘And you want to do anything rather than suffer.’

  ‘You mean, I have pragmatically assessed the best survival options. We each need time. So we go along with Leopold.’

  ‘For a bit. And the minimum we can.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You know Jamie,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘if you got past your st
upid jokes, total self-obsession and craven cowardice, you might find inside you a kindly person trying to get out.’

  I was hurt by this.

  ‘Unlike you,’ I said.

  ‘For sure.’ She left.

  ‘Right,’ said Leopold, half an hour later, in the middle part of the habitat. He had been adding fresh scenery to create a clearing in light woodland.

  ‘This landscape,’ said Leopold, ‘is empty. A wide canvas to paint your dreams on.’

  I could hear a stream. The meadow-grass was soft, the sun was shining, you could fiddle with buttercups.

  Leopold had changed into some extremely ill-advised white shorts, white socks, trainers, T-shirt, and baseball cap. You just had to look away, but then you kept being drawn back. He was sitting on a tree stump.

  ‘Now, your first lesson together: everything you believe is wrong. That isn’t necessarily a problem.’

  It would have been nicer to lie down, smell the meadow-grass, watch the clouds, sleep off breakfast and think of nothing, especially not loopy nonsense from an eternal being with uncalibrated fashion radar. He went on. ‘Can a fly understand its place in the universe? Of course not. It hasn’t got the mental capacity.

  ‘Can humans? Of course not. Same reason. Your puny minds and limited senses haven’t a hope. So all ultimate human explanations must necessarily be wrong. All religions must be wrong. The Universe will always be puzzling and mysterious because you cannot grasp what’s happening any more than a fly can.’

  He shifted his position on the tree trunk slightly, trying and failing to straighten his feet which forever swung backwards like a compass pointing north.

  ‘However. All is not lost. You still have yourselves. You also have all the things that previous generations have built and left lying around the Omniverse.’

  ‘Such as what?’ I said.

  ‘Such as everything. On earth, you’re used to driving on roads you didn’t build, in cars you didn’t invent. You write with an alphabet you didn’t think up, eat food you didn’t selectively breed, and on and on. You can inhabit ideas that other people have worked on, if they work for you.’

  ‘Even if they’re not true?’ I asked.

  ‘Everything that has been invented was made for the same reason—to satisfy ambition and be popular with girls,’ said Leopold. ‘Truth is nothing to do with it. It’s out there, it works for you, you can use it.’

  He clambered to a standing position, not entirely smoothly, bit of arthritis in the knee. ‘So here’s what we’re going to do. I’ve set up this place—’ He gestured around—‘as the perfect place to start. Ready to be filled with your dreams.

  ‘Then we discover that whatever life you choose to build together—you can improve on it by getting help from the spirits. Working with us gives you that bit extra to get ahead.

  ‘I shall wander in and out among you, sometimes here, sometimes there, ready to strengthen, advise, counsel. Lead you into greatness, into Art.’

  ‘Will you be wearing those shorts?’ I asked.

  ‘Why should I not?’

  ‘Well it’s—er—easier to think of you as one of the lads if you dress like that,’ I lied. (No friend of mine would last ten seconds at the gym in those.) ‘We might find it easier to think of you as a god if you were more, you know, robed in splendour.’

  ‘Ah! That’s where you make a mistake, you see. I am both great and I dwell with humans. Both.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said.

  Leopold looked over at Keziah. ‘You’ve been quite quiet this morning. Are you happy with all this?’

  ‘It’s still the morning,’ said Keziah, not looking up.

  ‘You may have to buck up, my dear girl,’ insisted Leopold. ‘If you’re to benefit from the training.’

  Keziah didn’t reply.

  ‘If there’s anything you need to say before I leave, say it.’

  ‘I’m not “your dear girl”,’ said Keziah.

  Leopold gave her a stare, then buzzed off, a lazy streak in the sky.

  Keziah and I were still sitting on the grass. I rolled over to look at her.

  ‘I thought you said you were going to cooperate?’ I asked.

  ‘I was.’

  ‘I’d like to see you being difficult.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t. And listen,’ she went on, ‘when I said you were kind-hearted I was trying to be nice. You just trampled on me.’

  Keziah, I noticed, had this female knack of restarting a conversation from the last time offence was taken, no matter how much has happened since. I can imagine men coming home after fighting their way through the Second World War and their wives saying to them, ‘Did you know, six years ago, you left the toilet seat up?’

  ‘You accused me of craven cowardice and total self-obsession,’ I continued.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My point is that it isn’t true.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘No,’ I said defiantly. ‘Not true at all. Ask anybody. Ask Caroline. You’ve met her. Former girlfriend. Librarian. Reads literary fiction. Knows about character.’

  I summoned her from my mental store and she appeared.

  ‘Hello, Caroline,’ I said. ‘Now listen, Keziah here—whom you’ve met, Caroline, Keziah, Keziah, Caroline—she says I suffer from craven cowardice and total self-obsession.’

  ‘Your point is?’

  ‘My point is you’re going to say, “what a fatheaded remark. You clearly don’t know the lad.”’

  Caroline thought for a moment.

  ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘I think she’s got you down pretty well.’

  ‘I can send you back to where you came from, you know.’

  ‘But you’re not going to because Keziah and I are going to go for a coffee and a triple-chocolate muffin. You can build something or something. Would you like to?’ she asked Keziah.

  ‘Chocolate’s important,’ replied Keziah.

  ‘Good,’ said Caroline. ‘Can we borrow the elephant?’

  ‘If you must,’ I said, and whistled for Dumbo.

  I watched them go, feeling a bit left behind. Right if you want me to build something, I thought, a little grumpily, I will. A maglev. A superfast train thumping through the countryside, resting on concrete supports for an extra-smooth ride. I started clearing some forest and installing the track.

  It wasn’t unlike a sim game, of course and, as many have discovered before me, large-scale industrialization is fun. It was soothing to extend the track, put bridges in, decide on the route round a mountain. You could forget your troubles. I chopped down trees, slotted in concrete supports and laid track, and rode up and down on the bits I’d finished, at speeds of 300 klicks an hour.

  The girls came back.

  ‘Enjoy your nosebag?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes we did,’ said Caroline. ‘But neither of us could believe how one-dimensional I am as a character. Honestly, Jamie. We went out for eighteen months. I’m your complete memory of me. It’s pathetic.’

  ‘Well I’m very sorry,’ I said, peeved.

  ‘It was a terrifying insight into the male mind.’

  ‘While you were away drinking coffee,’ I said, with dignity, ‘I started to construct a state-of-the-art railway. Look at it.’ I waved my hand at the slim line of concrete and steel curving into the distance.

  ‘Marvellous,’ said Caroline.

  ‘It’ll eventually link the whole country.’

  ‘There’s only you and Keziah here!’

  ‘And a lot of trees. True, but it’s good to have the infrastructure in early. Avoid the strategic planning mistakes of the past.’

  ‘I’m sorry, that won’t do at all,’ said another voice. It was Leopold’s, who was walking towards us, busy and fussy. ‘Is this what you’ve wasted your time doing? Won’t do.’ He waved at it and it vanished, telescoping in on itself.

  ‘I spent all morning on that,’ I protested.

  ‘Won’t do at all,’ he sighed. ‘I want you to build a hom
e together. Taking the best resources of both of you. Not a technology theme park. The man-woman-home thing is fundamental. That’s how you’ll be happy. Trust me. I’m a spirit and I know.’

  ‘Well, that’s tomorrow’s job.’ I said. ‘Look where the sun is! Lunchtime.’

  Leopold glared. ‘We’ve wasted a whole morning. Be on time tomorrow.’

  That afternoon I rebuilt the maglev in my own part of the habitat, though it didn’t have anywhere to go except up and down the coast for a few miles. It had stops at the lighthouse landing stage, Lord’s Cricket Ground/Osama’s, the River Cam, and Edwards Air Force Base.

  Truth to tell, it was a bit boring riding up and down, especially at 300km/hr, as the time between the stations was about 1.4 seconds, and the acceleration and deceleration made you fear for your lunch.

  So instead I built a funfair. I took Annie, Caroline’s other house-mate. I’d often shared a kitchen with Annie while, upstairs, thumping noises indicated that Caroline was on an expedition through her wardrobe, on a quest for the elusive magic clothes that made her feel good about her body.

  Annie was a round-faced, brainy, long-haired Singaporean Chinese girl, a postgrad, a cellist. She had a good line in smiling shyly but not much conversation, which was just as well, because the gentle exterior hid the most terrifying right-wing opinions. Among the unspoken rules in Caroline’s household was never talk politics with Annie. Anyhow, there were Annie and me, silent Annie and me, going round and round on the Big Wheel in an empty fairground, not talking politics.

  Half an hour of this was plenty. I erased Annie from the scene (she said she didn’t mind), rowed to the lighthouse, cooked myself a curry, watched a movie.

  Still not sleepy. Phoned Keziah. It rang for a long time before she answered.

  ‘Were you asleep?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Just busy.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ I said. ‘Would you like a snack or something?’

  ‘Alright. Just give me some time to finish.’

  Shortly afterwards, we were sharing two hot chocolates on a rickety plastic table in my habitat. We overlooked the cliff and the lighthouse with the hot chocolate stall and the funfair behind us. It was warm and star-spangled and I had arranged a soft breeze. Not because I wanted to be romantic, not with Keziah, you jest, she’s scary, but because it was pleasant and because I could. The smell of fried potatoes and candy floss also drifted on the air. I had honky-tonk organ music playing in the background as an empty carousel whirled. Keziah had piled her hot chocolate with marshmallows and squirty cream.

  ‘How’s your building project going?’ I asked. I paused while she swallowed a marshmallow. ‘You shouldn’t put so many in at once.’

  ‘I got rid of everything you saw,’ said Keziah, stirring her chocolate. ‘Started again.’

  ‘Remind me what you are trying to do?’

  ‘I’m pulling out every memory I’ve ever had. I’m looking at how it felt. Then I’m filing it.’

  ‘I never knew filing could be so much fun.’

  ‘Do you know what forensic scientists say?’

  I was lost by this apparent change of subject.

  ‘Er—“Hello, I’m a forensic scientist”?’ I suggested, then made one or two rude suggestions about what forensic scientists might say, involving rubber gloves.

  ‘They say, “Every contact leaves a trace”,’ said Keziah. ‘So I think every experience leaves a trace in your personality. By looking at them one by one, you can build a model of your whole self.’

  ‘There must be millions of memories.’

  ‘That’s why it’s so engrossing. Of course you can pick the most important memories first and then work down.’

  She swallowed another marshmallow. ‘I’m still trying to get it all to work the way I want. I’ve had the same dream several times. It might be a clue from my subconscious—a landscape. That’s what I’m building.’

  ‘I told you about my dream, didn’t I? It’s a beach resort that’s full of old friends and my sister Lizzie. There’s a big Dome over it to keep the elements out. Oh, and there’s constant pressure to break into the Dome, led by all the people I’ve ever disliked, which is a lot, some corrosive acid rain, and a seven-foot-tall ghoul. I could imagine it’s my subconscious sorting itself out.’

  ‘What’s he like?’ asked Keziah.

  ‘What, the ghoul? Big and ghoulish. He’s tall and thin, covered in welts and he has bony, jabbing fingers.’

  ‘Hair?’

  ‘Short and lank, probably, but hard to see under his hat. He dresses like someone caught in a rainstorm in the 1930s.’

  ‘About seven feet tall? I’ve seen him too.’

  ‘What? Weird. Do you think we should mention this to Leopold?’

  ‘No. Tell Gaston and Leopold as little as possible.’

  ‘You really hate them, don’t you? For me, I think you have to get along with people.’

  ‘Well, tomorrow you’ll be happy, because we have to be all domesticated.’

  ‘I know. Build a home. Why does he want us to do that, do you think?’

  ‘Oh that’s easy. He’s just like every sex attacker I’ve ever met. A home is always what they want. Husband brings wife a bunch of flowers every Friday. Wife is cooking a pie. Rubber boots and plastic tractors in the hall. He can’t have it himself but he wants to somehow create it through us.’

  ‘Do you meet many sex attackers?’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘What a nice job you have.’

  ‘Keeps me on the straight and narrow.’

  ‘So anyway,’ I said, wanting to change the conversation, ‘tomorrow it has to be flowers and pies.’

  ‘Please don’t gush tomorrow, will you?’ said Keziah. ‘I’ll be sick.’