“Do you think about what you’re going to say, or do you just let the air pass over your lips?” asked Uncle Jerry.
Maternus felt an old, familiar urge to lash out at this unpleasant man with a rat’s face. To hit him would not only have gratified the Roman, it would have been a righteous blow on behalf of his two friends, neither of whom clearly felt powerful enough to defy their landlord. Only when Maternus remembered what Mr. Worthy had said in regards to violence did he unclinch the fist he had momentarily clasped.
“I think it has been an honor to make your acquaintance, sir,” said the Roman and exhaled. “Now it is time my friends showed me their quarters.”
The three of them excused themselves from Uncle Jerry’s presence and went upstairs to Stephen’s room, which was even shabbier than the living room. The small bed was lopsided and had unwashed clothing scattered across its top quilt. On the walls of his bedroom Stephen had posted dozens of letters he had written to various newspapers and magazines, and these were turning yellow as they slowly aged beside equally old posters of the jazz musicians Miles Davis and John Coltrane. On the nightstand, within easy reach of anyone lying on the bed, were several magazines of the sort featuring young women with abnormally large breasts. A crusty hot plate was atop the room’s only dresser; the oppressive smell of the several years of accumulated food stuck to its edges rivaled that of the socks Stephen had left on the floor and that of a third aroma — something like burned hay — that the Roman had previously sensed on Shen and Stephen when he sat beside them in the library. To make room for Maternus to sit on the room’s only chair, Stephen had to gather up some armfuls of wrappers and clothing and move them to the bed.
“Want to smoke a doobie?” Stephen asked the Roman as the latter settled onto his wobbly seat.
“Since I have never done what you ask, I would have to say ‘no,’” said Maternus, unaware his friend was speaking of the source of the third distinct odor.
“You’ve got a little of the pruritanical in you, bro,” said Shen, who had never met anyone who would refuse marijuana.
“Puritanical,” said Stephen.
“Pruritanical is something I just created,” said Shen, lighting up what Maternus assumed was a cigarette identical to those he had found in the girls’ restroom at the middle school. “It’s a portmanteau word — part Puritanical — part prurient. It means: both repressed and a little curious at the same time. Poets have the right to create new vocabulary like that.”
“The Puritans were Protestants within the Church of England during the sixteenth century,” noted Maternus. “They demanded greater simplicity in doctrine and ritual than was then prevalent. I know this because of the introduction to Milton’s poetry in the Great Books Series. In what way am I related to those Englishmen?”
“You have to trust me on this, Matt,” said Shen. “No offense; I’m only saying you are a little on the uptight side. I guess that comes from having been a soldier and from growing up in a rural place.”
He took a long drag on the cigarette before he handed it to Stephen, who performed exactly the same movements the poet had. Maternus wrinkled his nose at the powerful smell, a gesture his two friends took to be a sign of disapproval. In fact, Maternus was remembering how he had watched the weary men of the Middle East sit on their haunches in the doorways of their mud-brick homes and chew on the mild narcotic known as khat. Both those natives of long ago and his two new companions seemed conquered people, men absolutely ruled by others.
Maternus asked to see Shen’s room, and Stephen doused the cigarette before opening the door lest they let too much smoke into the hallway. (Uncle Jerry had complained on previous nights about the smell.) The bedroom they took him to was tidier than Stephen’s, and had an eye-popping red satin bedspread. On the four walls were dozens of portraits of Shen, each of them taken or drawn by former girlfriends.
“Women like to get a man down on sketch paper,” he explained to Maternus when he saw the Roman looking at a charcoal nude. “They think if they can capture the image of the man, they might get the man himself.”
Maternus realized Shen was once more straining to impress him. The effort seemed just then to be extraordinarily sad.
The poetry slam may have been rather silly. It also had been brimming with a wild energy that was a boon to Shen and Stephen. Maternus could tell his friends had been content at the Great Blue Heron, where Stephen could support Shen and the poet could be the center of attention. Here, in the run-down boarding house, Maternus thought his two friends seemed smaller than he had previously sensed them to be. In the soldier’s broad chest there arose a familiar ache, one he had known hundreds of years ago when he witnessed his companions in arms fall in the rush of combat or whenever he saw them suffer humiliations at the hands of the patrician officers. He felt that if he stayed in that sad place a minute longer he would become too melancholy to sleep that night. Maternus told his friends the small lie that he had something to do at the school where he worked, and, after shaking hands with Shen and Stephen, he escaped the wretched boarding house and entered the soothing atmosphere offered by the cool summer night, and was glad to walk beneath the leafy branches hanging low over the suburban sidewalks.
V
A Child, Beloved of God
The soldier had not left his friends’ quarters soon enough. He went to bed with a heart that was already saddened, and after much tossing and adjusting of his bed clothing, he drifted into a dream more unpleasant than Shen and Stephen’s boarding house had been. He saw in his dream a spring day in a great city. Nearly everyone was in white, save for the slaves in unbleached cloth and the tall, armed men he recognized as Praetorians by their silver breastplates and the blood-red capes upon their backs. Every one of the women and many of the men in the vast crowd the Roman was looking down upon wore entire bouquets of wild flowers in their hair. On this day, the twenty-seventh of March, the last day of the Festival of Cybele, thousands of them had their hands held in front of them, palms extended upwards as they repeated the nature goddess’ myriad names: “Agdistis, Dindymene, Maia, Ops, Tallus, Ceres, Mater Deum Magna Idaea…”
Maternus was standing high in the stands of a vast arena, and he recognized the oblong race course beneath him as the Circus Maximus, the venue to which the emperor had moved the last stages of the celebration when the streets around Cybele’s temple in the city had become too small to hold the holiday crowds. On the race course appeared the Galli, the goddess’s white-robed, castrated priests, leading a chariot bearing the goddess’s silver statue, which the priests had that morning dipped into the Almo River. A tame lion walked on both sides of the chariot, attending Cybele as they had when she had first wandered the hills of Phrygia. Attendants of both sexes, dressed in furs like wild barbarians, danced at the flanks of the procession, tossing flower petals into the air as the chariot crept forward. Emperor Commodus and a small group of bodyguards came onto the center of the course to touch the sacred image, thereby assuring himself fertility throughout the coming year. He and his protectors were few, a dozen at the most. Maternus felt himself leave his perch on the stone bench and step forward, as did a hundred other members of his conspiracy.
In the moment that should have provided Maternus and his men the opportunity to strike at the hated Caesar, three thousand soldiers — half the Praetorian legion — came charging into the field of the Circus Maximus, Septimus Severus, the very general Maternus had revolted against in Gaul, riding at their lead.
“Treason!” the crowd heard the general shout as he waved his sword in the air and reigned his horse to a stop in front of the startled emperor. “Treason, my lord!”
Those were the last coherent words anyone in the arena stands would hear that afternoon. A scream of terror sounded from twenty thousand lungs when more Praetorians appeared at the arena’s exits. Maternus could see Severus speaking to the emperor, no doubt telling Commodus of the assassins in the crowd, the deserters from beyond the Alps, the men led by Mater
nus. On the horse behind Severus was none other than young Casio, the soldier Maternus had left outside the city to spare his life, and he was pointing into the crowd, in the general direction of Maternus himself. Clearly Casio had betrayed the plot to Severus, and the general was now rescuing the emperor at the penultimate moment. Animated by the vain hope he or some of his men might yet reach Commodus before the soldiers had swept through the stone seats, Maternus gripped the short sword beneath his tunic and fought his way past a score of frightened civilians as he charged the race course and the emperor’s entourage. He had not gone four steps lower when he felt a blow from behind, as if someone had struck him with a steel fist, causing the air to leave his right lung. He turned and beheld old Marcellus, his companion in arms for the previous twenty-two years, standing with a knife in his hand, and Maternus saw the blood running down his own side. Now betrayed by everyone he had once trusted, Maternus fell down the next two rows of seats, then swiftly righted himself. He felt no pain, only a little confused. He was still alive. He still had his strong right arm. He could yet feel the cloud of anger rising from his chest. What were these terrified people rushing past him? What would they matter tomorrow? The light faded while he was still assuring himself everything was going to be better, and he fell.
He awoke lying inside his bed in his tiny apartment. The demon Banewill and the angel Mr. Worthy were standing at his feet.
“Having a bad nightmare?” asked the demon and grinned. “Remembering how old friends betrayed you? Perhaps your new ones will do the same? That shambling loser Stephen and his darkie companion, Shen. Who are they really? Do you actually believe you can trust them?”
“Quit that,” said Mr. Worthy and drew near so he could touch the Roman on the forehead, causing a warm, comforting sensation to spread through the whole of Maternus’s body. “Bad memories haunt everyone,” he said to Maternus. “Isn’t it wonderful how quickly you’ve made friends in this strange new land in which we’ve placed you?! And you’ve kept your temper all this season. I’m so proud of you, son.”
“‘Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it wonderful?’” said Banewill in a falsetto voice, and pretended to vomit. “He’s hooked up with the two saddest characters in town. What’s so wonderful about that?”
“All humans have value, albeit sometimes their value is not obvious to everyone else,” said the angel. “Shen and Stephen face unique struggles. They are different than other men.”
“Don’t even try to play the defective card with those two,” said Banewill. “You’ve already cheated us out of the retarded and the mentally ill. Our side has always had claim on the foolish, and you can rest assured — should you ever chose to rest — we have a hot little cesspool on the Fourth Level where those two bozos will boil with the other wayward souls for the rest of eternity when their time comes. I think it would be an apt send-off for them if a truck — say, one carrying organic farm produce — ran over the sorry pair when they are bicycling back from their one thousandth poetry goof-off. No, make it a truck full of organic coffee bound from the same smarmy java joint the two of them have just left; the wooly-headed truck driver glances down to read a line of Shen’s own rotten verse, and wham — he flattens them. Now, that would be ironic!”
“No one’s damnation is guaranteed,” said Mr. Worthy.
“Don’t tell me you’ve got something better planned for Tweedle-Dumb and Dumber,” said the demon, irked at the thought of losing both Shen and Stephen.
“Then I won’t tell you anything,” said Mr. Worthy. He narrowed his eyes and observed Banewill a little more closely. “You’ve altered your appearance since last we met,” he said.
“My Vincent Price look,” said the demon and twirled the end of his moustache. “The velvet vest, the star garnet tie pin, the short jacket with tails — very late Victorian, very House of Wax, don’t you think?”
“Mr. Price never twirled his waxed moustache,” said the angel. “You favor Snidely Whiplash more than any actor of flesh and blood.”
His vanity injured by the comparison to a cartoon character, Banewill recoiled in chagrin for a second, but rebounded to say, “This from someone who hasn’t had a decent haircut or a new robe in twelve thousand years.”
“You forget we don’t allow fashion into heaven,” smiled the angel. “Get up, my strong friend,” he said, turning to Maternus. “We have something for you.”
“We’re going to the garden?” asked Maternus, sitting upright in his bed.
“Not yet, my friend, not yet,” laughed the gentle angel and patted the Roman’s hand. “We have work to do first.”
“You have your whole bloody redemption program ahead of you, ape boy,” said the demon. “Starting with your first task.”
“This is nothing to fear, it’s nothing you can’t easily do,” said the angel and took from a secret fold in his robe the folded slip of paper on which the demon had written when Maternus first spoke to them. “Ahem,” he said, clearing his throat as he prepared to read. “First of all: you have to help Edith Pink win the affection of Abdul Rathman.”
Maternus waited for there to be something more, something that would make sense to him. Both the angel and the demon raised their eyebrows and nodded at the Roman, indicating he was expected to make a response.
“You will be introducing me to these people?” asked Maternus.
“You already know them,” said Mr. Worthy, “though you don’t yet know them by name.”
“They are people at the library?” asked Maternus.
“People — in the marginal sense — from school,” said the demon. “Tell me, anvil face, what was the most vicious incident you have witnessed at Susan B. Anthony Middle School during the two months you have been working there?”
Maternus did not have to think long to conjure up an answer.
“There was a fight in the hallway,” he said. “One seventh-grade girl bumped into another and caused the second girl’s books to fall onto the floor. This second girl, a terrible little monster with a single eyebrow across her forehead and haircut as severe as a Parthian’s helmet, she attacked the first child; I mean she jumped on the other girl and bit her. This horrible child hung onto the other like a badger on a hunting dog. The other girl was screaming in pain until Mr. Hamburg ran from the office and yanked the child off. I had to mop up the blood. That was the worst thing I have seen at work.”
“Bingo,” said Banewill. “That wonderfully nasty little biter was sweet Edith Pink herself.”
“The child is a bit high spirited,” admitted Mr. Worthy.
“Her father is a dentist and her mother works for the DMV,” said the demon. “The will to harm others is in her genes.”
“Nonsense,” countered Mr. Worthy. “There’s no such thing as a bad seed. Miss Edith may, at first glance, seem a frightful…” He searched for the proper word.
“Ogre?” suggested the demon.
“An overly aggressive child,” said the angel.
“In ten years she’s going to cut up her parents with a set of Japanese kitchen knives her cheapskate dentist father purchased for nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents after watching an hour-long commercial on the USA Network,” said Banewill and smiled serenely at the thought that future event. “Snip, snip, snip. The event will be so hideous, Quentin Tarantino will need three movies to tell the full story.”
“So you hope,” said Mr. Worthy. “In fact, Miss Edith will become capable of great kindness and wonderful charity, should she learn she is worthy of being loved.”
“And this Abdul?” said Maternus.
“Abdul Rathman,” said Mr. Worthy. “He’s a very sensitive, thoughtful child who also attends your school.”
“A round, brown, doughnut hole of an A-rab boy,” said Banewill, speaking almost on top of the angel’s words. “Think of the helpless young coward the other students pick on the most.”
Maternus’s mind was at once occupied by the image of a certain chubby boy the Roman had seen being sma
cked by a dozen jeering bullies as he scrambled toward the cafeteria and the safety of adult supervision. So terrified was the boy that he had pretended to laugh every time he was slapped on the back of the head by one of his grinning tormentors. The Roman next thought of the time the other students had tossed Abdul into his locker and locked the door behind him; the trapped boy had wailed in terror until Mr. Hamburg brought a pair of bolt cutters from the office to take off the padlock and set the child free. Then he remembered when the others had forced Abdul to wear his shorts on his head and chased him about the gymnasium till he ran headlong into a wall, knocking himself unconscious for a full two minutes.
“Yes, that’s the one,” said the demon.
“Don’t pretend you know what he’s thinking,” said Mr. Worthy to the demon. “True,” he said to Maternus, “young Abdul has had a rough time of it at the middle school. Some children, because they are weak, attract such horrid abuse. There are learned men today who believe the bullies can pick out these weaklings by some signaling movement or by a specific smell. In fact—”
“In fact, the strong have ever feasted upon the weak,” said Banewill. “No one should know better than you, hammer head, how readily the powerful batter down the small. You know they do it only because it feels good. The mighty need no reason for their actions. Their actions justify themselves.”
Despite knowing Banewill was dangerous, Maternus could not help but be aroused by the demon’s words. Talk of battering made the Roman think of combats long past and of how well he had done his duty on the field of honor. He felt the gladius in his right hand and the heavy shield drawn tightly to his chest.
“Small wonder you ended up in Hell, Banewill,” said Mr. Worthy. “Which is where anyone following your philosophy will go.”
“I am to make the girl care for the boy?” asked Maternus, becoming increasingly anxious about his chances of successfully completing this task.
Hell Can Wait Page 10
