Hell Can Wait

by Theodore Judson

  “Down, Bernard!” Stephen ordered the happy brute who had suddenly leapt to his rear legs and put his massive paws on the Roman’s chest. “Matt doesn’t want you up there.”

  Maternus was thankful to realize in that instant — when the half Labrador/half Mastiff looked directly into his face — that dogs, like people, had become tamer since his days in uniform. In ancient times such a ferocious, healthy dog would have ripped Maternus’s face off had it gotten this close to him, and the beast would have only been doing its master’s bidding, for dogs had been reared to be the savages who protected the family hearth. Now (again like the people) American dogs sincerely wanted to be everyone’s friend, a change that, in the Roman’s opinion, must have made life easier for burglars and more difficult for property owners.

  “Bernard and Rufus don’t understand,” Stephen explained to Maternus. “You’re with us, so they figured you’re somebody they know.”

  “He is as ugly as I am,” said Maternus, craning his head back to avoid the long, wet tongue the dog flicked at his face. “Perhaps he thinks I am a relative of his.”

  Stephen was beside himself apologizing for his dog’s small act of aggression. He led Bernard and Rufus — the latter being a Newfoundland/Lab mix who was both prettier and dumber than Bernard — toward the enclosed backyard by taking them by their collars and dragging them in that direction. (Or rather they dragged him there, the two large and affable hounds being considerably stronger than the stoop-shouldered Stephen.)

  “Uncle Jerry doesn’t keep an eye on them like he should,” Stephen explained once he had the pair behind the back gate. “I hope he didn’t get your shirt dirty,” he said, and pointed to the spots on Maternus’s shirt where Bernard had set his paws.

  “My shirts get dirty every day,” allowed Maternus. “I wash them every week at the laundromat. One machine cleans them, and another rolls them dry. It is quite wonderful.”

  There was much in the modern world that was indeed wonderful to Maternus, and not only laundromats, tree-lined streets, and the charming way women laughed; there was also pie in restaurants (a subject for which the Roman could have gone against his nature and written a poem of rhapsodical praise), quiet city parks anyone could enter if he so desired, and flying machines Maternus had originally thought were dragons trailing smoke across the heavens when he spied them speeding high over Aurora. Shen and Stephen were too familiar with these everyday marvels to be much impressed by them. They did realize someone from Montana might think differently than they did.

  “We do our wash in the basement,” said Shen. “It’s not all that wonderful, I guess.”

  Lacking an angel’s ability to look into the future, Maternus could not foresee that he was about to witness the greatest, most awe-inspiring wonder of the modern age. Stephen leaned his bicycle against the house and fussed with his keys in the darkness before he could undo the lock and push open a door immediately to the right of the dimly illuminated window. Shen and the Roman followed close behind him. Once across the lintil of the doorway, Maternus could discern a flickering, bluish light dancing on the worn-out furniture in the front room and on the yellowed wallpaper. On a sofa in the very center of the room was a wiry, elderly man in his underwear with a face that bore some unfortunate similarities to that of an angry rat; he was looking directly into the source of the peculiar light. Once the three of them came around the sofa and could cast their eyes in the same direction as the old man, Maternus beheld an illuminated box inside which four small people — two men and two women — were sitting inside a small room and swapping jokes with one another. Maternus recognized they were telling jokes because someone — and he at first assumed it must be hundreds of other small people inside the same the small space, but positioned out of sight — were laughing every time one of the four small people spoke. The Roman gaped at the spectacle, his heart full of unutterable horror. Suddenly there was a knock at the door of the small room, and one of the young woman opened it to admit a third man holding a large fish by its tail. “Well,” said the young woman at the door, “at least somebody got lucky today.” This must have been the greatest joke anyone in the box had ever heard, for the invisible people laughed and clapped so loudly nothing else could be heard for nearly thirty seconds. Someone turned off the lights in the small room inside the box, making everything black, and when the switch was turned back on the scene was that of a much different room, in which a young woman was seated on a long upholstered chair and conversing quite nonchalantly with a green lizard about automobile insurance.

  The old man in his underwear pushed a button on a rectangular device he had in his hand and a third image appeared on the box, this one of a room filled with thousands of tiny people. In the middle of this room was an open space covered with what appeared to be lacquered wood. On this space were ten small black men in short pants and two white men in striped shirts, and they were all frantically running back and forth, much to the approval of the thousands watching them, although no one was laughing at this new scene.

  “Basketball,” observed Shen. “If you understand the NBA, you understand America.”

  “Yeah,” said the man on the sofa, “I understand that everything happening on the court is against the rules. If the refs called a fraction of the palming, traveling, double dribbling, three-second lane violations, elbowing, and cheap shots going on, the tattooed carnival freaks they call players these days would be doing nothing but tossing the ball inbounds or shooting foul shots. The game goes along only because nobody cares anymore that everything everyone does is a violation. Everything done is a crime, and it’s alright because everybody involved is a criminal. You’re right, Shen. It is like the damned country as a whole.”

  “It’s racist to criticize the NBA, Uncle Jerry,” said Stephen. “It only looks to be chaos because we’re white.”

  “I suppose the sport’s some sort of ironic statement now,” sneered the old man. “Why the hell are they playing tonight anyway? It’s June.”

  “It’s the postseason,” explained Shen.

  “They play all year round,” complained Jerry. “If it’s not the season or the postseason, it’s the fucking preseason. Hello,” he said of Maternus, who was carefully sidling around the sofa to get a closer look at the illuminated box. “Tell me this is a friend of yours,” said Jerry, “and not something I’m seeing ‘cause I’ve got the D.T.s. Mother of goddamned Christ, that is one scary-looking son of a bitch you’ve drug in here, fellows! Somebody use his face for target practice?”

  Maternus was oblivious to Uncle Jerry’s harsh questions because the whole of the soldier’s attention was fixed upon the lighted box, which he dared to touch with his left hand and immediately jumped back when he felt a snap of static electricity. Up close, the images on the box were filled with unnatural dots and they appeared extraordinarily thin when viewed from a side angle. Again, this was not modern magic, he thought. This was another machine capable of doing remarkable things.

  “The pictures and sounds come from somewhere else,” he said to no one in particular, “not from inside the box. How does it work?” he asked directly of the three men, who were taken aback by how much Maternus was fascinated by something as common as a television set.

  “Cable,” said Uncle Jerry and left his explanation at that.

  “They have these studios in California and New York,” said Stephen. “They shoot the programs there, and then, you know, it gets to us … somehow.”

  Not only was Maternus here confronting the most important invention of the age, he was also coming face to face with the single greatest difference between this era and his. Even as an illiterate soldier stationed in the distant reaches of the empire he had a general understanding of how everything functioned within his universe, no matter whether the thing was a farmer’s plow or the emperor issuing commands from faraway Rome. In Aurora the average person used hundreds of devices and institutions every day, and only a few among them knew how any of them worked, an
d not one of these average people in Aurora understood how all of the creations of man functioned. The ancient Romans had found mystery in nature and in the ways of the gods. Maternus could see now that Americans had made the merely human mysterious. In a few months more he would come to see the merely human was the only mystery Americans had.

  “How does it do that?” the Roman asked of the tela-transportation of recorded programs.

  “You know,” said Stephen and shrugged, “I suppose it’s like the telephone, except it shoots pictures out with the sound.” He wriggled his fingers in the air to give a useful demonstration of that portion of broadcast technology he could not illustrate in words.

  “No! Jesus H. Christ, you fucking moron,” said Uncle Jerry, “it’s not like that. Television is electrons and stuff shot from the back of the vacuum tube. When televisions had vacuum tubes, it was like that. Now I don’t know exactly. Now it’s all computer chips monitoring the electrons.”

  “Electricity is electrons,” noted Shen.

  “Thank you, Tom Edison,” said Uncle Jerry, not sounding in the least thankful for the poet’s input. “Who the fuck is this asshole anyway?” he asked of Maternus.

  Shen and Stephen did their now-familiar recitation of how this was Matt August, a former soldier from Montana, an introduction which did not move Uncle Jerry in the way it had others. When he heard Maternus was a veteran, the sour old man commented that it was a pity an Arab sniper had not shot the new visitor.

  “That’s kind of a tough thing to say,” said Stephen. “You don’t even know Matt. He’s a good guy.”

  “I know what kind of yahoos they have in the army these days,” said the old man. “I bet he’s never lived in a house without wheels under it.”

  Maternus was indifferent to Uncle Jerry’s insults because he was busy studying the television, on which he was carefully placing his wide hands and was remarking to himself how hot it felt.

  “Is there someone in Aurora I can contact who will tell me how this works?” he asked.

  “Try one of the geeks down at Radio Shack,” suggested Uncle Jerry. “Don’t you have TV in Montana? Who the hell would care how it works? The fucking cable guy doesn’t know how it works. He just plugs it in and takes our money. What more would he or anybody else want to know?”

  “The scene changes each time you press the object in your hand, sir?” asked Maternus, and Uncle Jerry changed the channel so that the four of them were suddenly watching a comely woman in leotards counting in twos as she did jumping jacks and displayed an unwarranted amount of manic enthusiasm.

  “Is he high?” Uncle Jerry asked his nephew and Shen.

  “Matt grew up underprivileged,” explained Stephen. “He doesn’t get a lot of things. Yes,” he said, now speaking directly to Maternus, “there are hundreds of channels, and you can get to any of them by clicking a button on the remote.”

  “They have hillbillies in Montana?” asked Uncle Jerry and contorted his face as he considered the possibility. “I thought there was nothing up there but a bunch of latte swilling ex-hippies who got rich during the dot com bubble. And don’t tell me he wants to live here. I’ve already got a full allotment of freaks renting from me, and that’s not counting family. All I need is one butt-ugly hillbilly.”

  “Does your leader — the one the books call the president — does he appear on this?” asked Maternus, still unperturbed by anything Uncle Jerry was saying.

  “Sure,” said Shen. “He’s on all the time.”

  “He comes right into individual homes and speaks directly to every citizen?!” marveled the Roman, trembling for a second when he considered how the emperors would have used this invention. “He can be your leader and yet act as a member of your family, address you as your most intimate friend. His power to persuade must be limitless. You Americans must look upon him as a god.”

  Of the many odd remarks Maternus had made since meeting Shen and Stephen, this was the one his new friends took to be the strangest, for they — like Uncle Jerry — had never felt for any politician anything other than the deepest contempt. Since he was the supreme politician, they held the president, whoever he happened to be at any specific moment in their lives, to be the most contemptuous figure in the entire world. Everyone they knew felt the same way.

  “The president’s an idiot,” said Stephen.

  “They’ve all been idiots,” asserted Uncle Jerry. “The Bushes are both a couple of inbred Yankee blue bloods. Kennedy and Clinton were a couple of out of control philanderers. Reagan was a cheesy, fifth-rate actor. Eisenhower and Ford were just plain stupid. Nixon and Johnson were both crooks. Truman was a little man in a big man’s office, though he wasn’t as little as Carter was. Not a decent, fifth-rate human animal among the whole lot.”

  “Haven’t you ever had a good president?” asked the Roman, a little shocked to hear that such a great and wealthy nation had such poor leaders.

  “FDR was pretty good,” conceded Uncle Jerry. “He was the last one that was larger than life.”

  “He knew how to use these television things effectively?” asked Maternus.

  “There wasn’t any TV back when FDR was alive,” said Uncle Jerry, and the four of them were briefly silent while they wondered in unison if Uncle Jerry’s words had a deeper meaning than he had intended. Given that they came from Uncle Jerry, Maternus and his two friends quickly decided they should not give the words too much weight.

  “It’s a complicated thing,” added Uncle Jerry. “Why don’t you just get a TV of your own? There’s no wonderful shit about them. The damn things only cost a couple hundred bucks. Bingo. You pay your cash, and you can look at the goddamn thing on your own time.”

  “No, sir,” said the Roman, only then stepping away from the television set. “I have too much reading yet to do. If I had one of these, I fear I would be tempted to watch it all day.”

  “Shit,” said Uncle Jerry, “who reads? I haven’t done it in years.”

  The three friends lingered in the living room a few minutes more, conversing with Stephen’s Uncle Jerry, or, to be more concise, they listened to Uncle Jerry complain about a painful catch in his side and the tasteless quality of most canned soups. Soup, like presidents, had also once been better. Maternus had observed that the other Americans he had met in Aurora sincerely wished to be liked, and while they might sometimes be off-putting at the beginning of the acquaintance, they each in their separate ways made efforts to ingratiate themselves to strangers. This was not true of Stephen’s Uncle Jerry. He had seemed vulgar and full of hatred when the Roman first heard him speak, and the more the old man talked, the more repellant he sounded. He was, the Roman learned, the sole owner of this boarding house in which Stephen and Shen lived. The old man rented rooms to seven other single men in the rambling house, and each of these other boarders Uncle Jerry described as either “spics” or “white trash,” although most were honest service workers and two were college students at a Catholic college in south Denver. Yet the majority of Uncle Jerry’s cutting remarks were directed at his nephew, whom Jerry held to be a mentally-ill failure, and at his nephew’s best friend, the struggling poet Shen, whose artistic calling Uncle Jerry held to be ridiculous.

  “One of ‘em can’t get a woman to look at him, and the other can’t afford to keep any of them what are interested in his black ass,” was one of the old man’s descriptions of the two men. “I’d throw the both of them out on the street if they didn’t keep the place in apple pie order.”

  “Actually, sir,” said Maternus, rising to his friends’ defense, “women greatly favor Shen.”

  “‘Favor?’” snarled the old man. “What kind of a faggot uses the world ‘favor?’ And what would a horror show like yourself know about women, anyway?”

  “I know what it is to care for one of them,” said Maternus, recalling Maria in her garden, and at the same time discovering that he resented this sneering old man more than Mr. Worthy would want him to.

  “You care
about one of ‘em,” Uncle Jerry mocked him. “That’s more fairy talk. I hope you aren’t expecting me to rent you a room. I’ve already got a full quota of misfits.”

  “No, sir,” said Maternus, glancing about the dingy front room and at the bits of garbage and dirty clothing on the floor. “I have a place of my own. It’s small, but it—”

  He nearly said: “It’s nicer than this,” but he stopped himself lest he belittle his two friends, whom he now truly knew to be poor. That Shen and Stephen were so impoverished they did odd jobs for this foul old man just to live in his filthy home would have stunned the Roman half an hour earlier, for the revelation completely undermined Maternus’s image of Stephen and Shen as gentlemen of leisure who had nothing better to do than linger about the public library. At that juncture in time Maternus decided he should not be quick to judge people. His friends’ condition, he told himself, was but further proof he understood nothing of this city and those living in it. Clearly, I am dull witted, thought the Roman, experience and reading were not revealing everything he needed to know in this strange land.

  “But it’s what?” asked Uncle Jerry.

  “It’s very small,” said Maternus.

  Jerry bunched his rat-like features on one side of his face and gazed intently at the Roman.

  “You’re none too swift, are you, moon pie?” he asked.

  Maternus had no clue what ‘moon pie’ might mean and took ‘swift’ to mean fleet of foot. He did grasp that the nasty little man was disparaging him, and that was a dangerous thing to do to a proud legionnaire.

  “I may look slow, but I can hold my own in a race,” said the veteran, whose right foot drifted behind him and his left slid forward as he unconsciously assumed a combatant’s stance.