“I think I’m pretty good with people,” Jim said. “I’ve had to deal with various people types during my time here. Scientists, novelists, world leaders, philosophers, actors.” He counted these upon his fingers. “If you look under recent job history there, I just helped the devil fix paradise. We had to bring a lot of different people together and get them motivated towards a unified goal. Like a, uh, facilitator. I facilitated a big project.”
This was his first job interview in three hundred years. And, like Hitler, he was a little rusty. The executive woman who sat on the other side of the desk wore thin lips and thick glasses. She looked at him over the rims.
“A facilitator?” she said.
“Yeah. You know, a bringer-together. I brought all those people types together and we patched the hole in the firmament. Everyone went away happy.”
“Do you even know what angels do, Jim?”
“Well, sure I do.”
“What do angels do, Jim?”
The executive woman never blinked. In her office there was only the desk and a bookshelf. And the bookshelf had no books, for it was filled with potted cactuses. A clock without numbers ticked on the wall.
Jim cleared his throat. “They roll out the welcome mat,” he said. “They keep the peace. Sometimes, anyway. When it suits them. The main thing about being an angel seems to be people. They’re really good with people and they can bring people together. They’re facilitators.”
“That’s it? They keep the peace? They facilitate?”
“Well, I’ve met a few that just seem to party and get high all the time. Heh.”
But the executive woman was not amused. She removed her glasses and set them on the desk. She spoke with restraint through her teeth.
“Angels do not get high.” She flipped through his file. “I’ve been screening applicants for a long time, Jim, and you’re the worst I’ve ever seen. By far. You’re reckless. You’re aimless. Your libido is a tornado. The devil sought your facilitation because you set off a nuclear chain reaction in your girlfriend’s vagina and started a religious war.”
She used the word vagina like an axe. The blade hung in the air and over Jim’s head. His body tensed and he waited for the blade to fall.
“And according to my records, after you nuked your girlfriend’s vagina you just left her there. You haven’t even called her back. Not even a text. Does that sort of behavior sound angelic to you?”
Jim gulped. “Cherry’s cool,” he said.
“The only reason I accepted to see you today was morbid curiosity. I asked myself, what sort of man spends the first three hundred years of eternity playing with his dick, and then applies to be an angel? What sort of ego? Does he really think he can walk into my office with nothing but a cock and a smile, and walk out with wings?”
Jim smiled. The executive woman slapped him through the face.
“Hey!”
“You’re a pig.”
“A pig in paradise.”
She slapped him through the face.
“Dammit! Why are you hitting me?”
“Why are you here, Jim? Why have you come into my office and applied to be an angel?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just sick of wandering around. It would be nice to be useful, you know? I’ve never been useful. I never had a purpose before. When I was alive I wandered around and everything sucked, and now that I’m dead I wander around and everything is awesome – but I’m still just wandering around. Being an angel, I figure it’s worth a shot. Maybe I can be shiny and useful, too.”
These words surprised Jim as much as they surprised the executive woman. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms and beheld him. Jim beheld her back while he rubbed his cheek.
“Vulnerability suits you,” she said.
So Jim said, “Thanks.”
“But it doesn’t wash away three hundred years of cocking around.”
“Maybe not.”
She walked to the bookshelf. After she sized Jim up, she chose from the shelf a cactus that was six inches tall and fairly thick. It wobbled when she set it upon the desk.
“Do you know what fascinates me about the cactus?” she said.
Jim shook his head.
“It’s strong. It’s resilient. It will quietly endure almost any environment, and stand resolute in the face of every adversity. I haven’t fed this one in months and still it survives.” She pricked her finger on one of its needles and showed Jim the blood. “And of course, it won’t be tamed. Resilient, violent, and useless.”
Then she took up a pair of scissors from her desk drawer. With the scissors she cut the cactus in half. Jim gulped again.
“Useless until you break it,” she said. “Only then do you discover its utility.” She lifted the cactus nub over her tongue, and from the nub there dribbled a pulpy white goo. The pulpy white goo dribbled into her mouth. It also dribbled down her chin. What dribbled down her chin she pushed back into her mouth, and then she swallowed.
Jim said, “I, uh, I want to be useful. But that’s not how mine works.”
The executive woman took out a pencil and some paper from the desk drawer. She wrote something on the paper and gave the paper to Jim.
“Before you take the entrance exam to become an angel, you’ll have to take a course on modern women issues. Go to that address. They’ll set you up.”
And upon the paper was written, Nil Cunt Court – Sylvia Plath’s Bottomless Pit of Feminist Revenge.
2
At the end of a middle class cul-de-sac Jim found a hole in the ground. It was large enough to swallow a house, and when he peered over the edge he couldn’t see the bottom. He plugged his nose and jumped in.
He fell for a long time. Then he fell for a while longer. The circle of middle class light shrank above the gravity of the hole until darkness came. He splashed down into something warm and sticky.
And it was a pool. The pool was surrounded by high walls and lit by torches. The liquid had the texture of mucus and the smell of warm metal. Jim treaded.
“Why have you disturbed the sacred pool?” It was a woman’s voice, soft but amplified by the acoustics of the cavern. Jim beheld a pale woman standing upon the wall.
“I’m here to take the modern woman course,” he said.
“For what reason?”
“I applied to be an angel. They said I had to come here first.”
“What do you know of the modern woman?”
“She’s new?”
“Lesson one: The modern woman of paradise does not bleed. Her menstrual cycle is tuned to a secret frequency, transmitted over radio waves, and the fluids are collected in this pool.”
Now Jim saw the outlet valves upon the walls. They spurted out more of the viscous fluid at irregular intervals. He thought, I got some in my mouth.
“There is only one way up,” the pale woman said. She lifted her skirt and her bush rolled down the side of the wall like a banner. It was a bush of centuries.
Jim swam over to it, grabbed a fistful of the gnarled hair, pulled himself out of the menstrual goop. His hands were slick with the blood-mucus and the bush was unwashed and greasy. Lint and crumbs and flakes fell from the bush, to pepper the pool below.
In my mouth, he thought again.
When at last he pulled himself over the top of the wall, he was sticky with menstrual blood and fuzzy with the pale woman’s bush lint. He was tarred and feathered.
He said, “Do all angles get their wings this way?”
“Some,” the pale woman said. She jerked her leg and the bush rolled back up between her legs. She took down a torch from the wall. “Follow me.”
3
The tunnels were dark and labyrinthine. The only light came from the pale woman’s torch.
“Are you Sylvia Plath?” Jim said.
“No,” the pale woman said.
“Where are we going?”
“You will see.”
“Will there be a shower?”
“Perhaps.”
They turned and turned again. Some turns they didn’t take. They went lower and lower. Jim was uncomfortable in the sticky silence, but he could summon no cues to conversation. Then, after many turns, he said,
“So, what’s with the zero? In the address. Nil Cunt Court, it’s a funny address. I’d have thought you’d be on something like, Women Are Awesome Avenue. But you’re at the court of zero cunts. It’s a little weird.”
“We are nil because all other numbers are either phallic or lesbian,” the pale woman said. She walked like a ghost and spoke sharply. “Zero is a woman’s only refuge from the chauvinist math of men.”
Jim pictured the numbers in his head: 1234567890. The one was a forthright phallus, and so was the seven. But the others were mysterious to him.
“Is the two phallic or lesbian?”
“The two is an inverted ballsack and phallus,” she said.
“Huh. And three?”
“Just balls.”
“Four?”
“Three phalluses.”
“A four is three dicks?”
“Yes.”
“What’s five?”
“Regular ballsack and phallus.”
Jim mulled it over. The pale woman walked.
“So eight’s the lesbian,” he said. “What about six and nine?”
“You know very well what six and nine are doing.”
“Well, there you go. That’s mutual. They’re both having fun.”
“Please. Six is obviously the woman, and nine the man. Six is worth less and is upturned and submissive. She is a gagged bitch hanging from her ankles and she is ever at the mercy of the rapist nine.”
And as the pale woman led him deeper into the feminist cavern, Jim quietly exercised his brain with the strange new arithmetic. He thought, A hard dick plus a pussy is a hard dick, but a hard dick times a pussy is a pussy. And a hard dick squared is itself. But two hard dicks added together is an inverted ballsack and limp dick, which if squared becomes three dicks. And three dicks squared is one hard dick and a gagged bitch.
“Huh,” he said. “The square root of a rapist is balls.”
“And every vagina increases a number’s value by an order of magnitude,” the pale woman said. “At least men got that much right.”
Jim thought, If that’s true for pussies it’s probably true for balls and lesbians and rapists too. And magnitudes come in multiples of hard-dick-and-pussy, together. He kept his reservations to himself and said,
“I had no idea that feminists had to learn math all over again.”
Then they came to a round door. The pale woman opened it and Jim went through.
4
These are the courses that Jim took in the caverns of the Bottomless Pit of Feminist Revenge: Entrenched Symbolism as a Justified Means of the Objectification of All Women Everywhere, The Importance of Being Sensitive but not too Sensitive because that’s Patronizing you Entitled Sonofabitch, Emotional Awareness and Dating the Empowered Woman, Pillow Talk 101, and Pillow Talk 201. He tested out of Feminist Mathematics.
And the final course was Natural Beauty and the Institutional Shaming of the Female Form. It was taught by a horrible fat woman who drooled and was also ugly. Jim sat at a kindergarten desk and looked at her with bloodshot eyes.
Now the horrible fat woman held up two pictures. In one picture there was a hot chick, and in the other there was a fat chick. And the horrible fat woman said, “Which of these do you prefer?”
“The hot chick,” Jim said.
The horrible fat woman whapped his knuckles with a phallus. It was a ruler, but according to the Entrenched Symbolism course book it was also a phallus. The horrible fat woman said, “The correct answer is, I do not have enough information.”
So Jim pointed to the picture of the fat chick. “That’s a lot of information.”
Whap!
“Beauty is a totality,” she said. “And that totality has been fragmented by the misogynist media, hyper-sexualized at the expense of the Natural Woman, packed up and airbrushed for the gratification of Abusive Men. Did you even read the chapter on the commercialization of the female form? Open your book to page six hundred and seventy-two. No, seventy-two. Read the first sentence. Aloud.”
Jim rubbed his knuckles. Then he rubbed his bloodshot eyes. And then he rubbed his temples. He read,
“The commercialization of the female form has normative blowback, and your male brain has been artificially rewired to appreciate only the immediate and physical aspects of a much deeper feminine glory.”
“And do you suppose, by deeper feminine glory, the text refers to hotness or fatness?”
“No.”
“Well then what do you suppose it refers to?”
“I don’t know.” Jim searched his brain. “Sense of humor. Intelligence. Abilities. It’s saying I should pretend fat girls aren’t fat because they might be cool.”
“No, no, no!” The horrible fat woman whapped his knuckles with the phallus. “You search beyond the physical. Find the woman inside. It is your duty as a modern man to unlearn these perversions of sexual selection, and to accept and admire the Natural Woman.”
But Jim had no more patience. For though he swam through the sacred pool of menstrual blood, climbed the bush of centuries, learned phallic algebra, and let a woman pay for his steak, he could not endure the Female Form. He squeezed out of the kindergarten desk and stood to surrender.
“You know what, I give up,” he said. “I’ve got nothing against anybody, but I like what I like. And I like the hot chick. Because she’s hot. If the price of being an angel is that I’ve got to like what I don’t like, just count me out. I mean, what’s wrong with sexual selection? And why the hell is she fat in paradise? I don’t care. Keep the wings. And for the love of humanity show me the way out of here.”
To Jim’s surprise the horrible fat woman sighed with relief. She dug a finger into her scalp and unzipped herself from forehead to crotch. The fat fell to the floor. Out of it stepped an attractive young woman who was angry and sweaty. She was even the hot chick from the photograph.
“Seventeen hours?” she said. “Really? Seventeen fucking hours?” She went to a closet and took up her purse, and from the purse she took out a pocket mirror. “Ughh. I look like a truck stop whore.”
“What’s happening?” Jim said.
“The last room is a test,” she said. “It’s a test to see how long you can put up with our bullshit.”
“Did I pass?”
“Pass?” She stuffed the fat suit into the closet. “Did I pass?” She stripped out of her unitard and was naked. She squatted to scour the purse. “One hour. You only have to last for one hour. Uhghhh! I can never find anything in here!”
“Well, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I can’t tell you. I lose my job if I tell you.” She found some underwear and snapped it on. She pulled her hair back in a scrunchie. “I pick up one afternoon shift, and I get the wonderboy who shatters the fucking record. That bitch Susie owes me big time.”
“So I passed.”
“You fucking passed.”
The hot chick pulled from her purse a short skirt, a tank top, a bracelet of beads, and a pair of high heels. Then she was dressed and out the door.
“Wait!” Jim followed her. “Is it over? Are you Sylvia Plath? Am I gonna get my angel wings?”
“I’m taking you to Sylvia, wonderboy.” She applied make-up as she marched down the cavern in heels. “Seventeen hours. I ran out of shit to say, like, ten hours ago. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Jim had to walk fast to keep up. “I thought you were fat,” he said.
5
So Jim came to the apartments of Sylvia Plath. They were so deep in the feminist cavern that the gravity of paradise shifted, and everything was upside down. Sylvia sat in a cushioned chair upon the ceiling. She pursed her lips as she worked at a crossword puzzle. Jim clung to the floor and looked down at her.
“You’re so deep you’re upside down,” he said.
Sylvia started to laugh, then plugged her mouth with a fist, and then she laughed anyway. She stood and walked over to Jim. They stood up-face to down-face.
“Jim,” she said.
“Sylvia.”
“I heard you gave poor Ashley quite the show.”
“Ashley? Was that the, uh, the girl in the suit? Natural Beauty?”
“Seventeen hours. You doubled the record, you know.”
“Doubled?”
“Doubled.”
“Sorry.”
“Most men, they just sit there, stiff as a brick, and take the punishment for as long as they can. They endure. But you, I think you tried to understand it.”
“I guess I did. I had my doubts, though.”
“Doubts. And what makes a man like Jim have doubts?”
“Well, when I added two rapists together, I got a hard dick and a lesbian. That was kind of hard to swallow.”
Sylvia laughed again. She put a soft hand on his chest. She said, “You’re a sweet man, Jim. A sweet man with a good heart.” Then her smile was a razor, and she whispered into his ear, “I hope it’s not a secret, because it isn’t safe with me.”
She kissed him upon the cheek. The kiss cut through his skin and entered a vein, and through the vein it found his heart and then his head. It died there, but its warmth lingered in his face.
“Do you have the paper?” she said. “I believe I have to sign something. And you can go get your wings.”
Jim gave her the form. She signed it upon his forehead and folded it neatly and tucked it into his shirt pocket.
“And did you understand any of it?” she said.
“No,” Jim said. “Not really.”
“Would you believe we prefer it that way?”
“Yes.”
Sylvia made the smile that was a razor, and she showed him the way out of the Bottomless Pit of Feminist Revenge.
6
The executive woman stared in amazement at the form that made official the non-misogyny of Jim. Her thin lips wrestled her pointed nose and her eyebrows were raised high over the rims of her glasses.
Book of Jim: Agnostic Parables and Dick Jokes From Lucifer's Paradise Page 11
