The Silver Pen and the Men in White Suits (One of Them Has a Beard)

First of all I apologize for the length of this piece. I thought about doing it in multiple parts but decided it wouldn't work as well. Let me know what you think and absolutely feel free to criticize it.

By Dr. Mullin

Religion has never played a big part in my relationships, which would explain how a semi-pious Catholic and myself – a raving Atheist – were able to coexist peacefully and even sleep together for two years without much of an incident outside the typical fight over stupid shit that, in the end, doesn’t matter at all.

I was lucky enough that it never came up that I think religion is a crutch for the weak and the excuse of all excuses to explain the unknown, and it never came up that she believed in a greater being and an afterlife and that everything happens for a reason.

And when I got down on one knee four months ago, she said “yes” without so much as a, “So how is this ceremony going to go, exactly?” I was fortunate.

Well, until about two hours ago, when she called me to tell me that she has been cheating on me for the past two months. And when I tell you that it’s because, “Jake, you’re just not a good Christian,” I hope I’m not the only one who sees the magnificent irony there.

And this brings us to now. I’m the only one home. I’m standing in the upstairs bathroom, same as I have been for about half an hour now, just staring at myself in the mirror. With an occasional glance, of course, to the nifty little piece of hardware I brought in with me.

This gorgeously morbid piece of machinery is a Ruger .22 rifle. Not quite something Arnold might carry around on him, but it should do the trick – at least that’s what I’m hoping. I’ve never done this before, obviously.

No, it’s not mine. It’s my little brother’s, which in and of itself is a little strange. It would be weirder if he hadn’t started carrying around knives some time in the past year. Don’t know why – and these aren’t just knives, mind you, they’re KNIVES, like two steps under Rambo himself.

I decided to get it from his closet when I realized that I was too angry to just let this bullshit go. I’ll be honest, my first thought was finding out who the other son of a bitch was and taking him with me, but I realize that she would never tell me anyway. Fucker.

And it doesn’t matter. All I want to get out of this is an end to all this crap – how the hell am I ever going to trust another woman again when the one I thought was perfect totally fucks me over like this?

Go ahead and call me a pessimist if you want, but you can go fuck yourself. I’m a realist, and reality sucks ass. Take it or leave it, kiddies.

And on the plus side, maybe she will realize it’s all her fault and feel like shit for it. That would be a nice bonus.

The gun’s loaded, but I’m not. Maybe I should be. Might make this whole thing a lot easier. I’m wondering if I can actually go through with it, if I can actually point and pull the trigger and not give a damn about what happens next. I think I can.

Time for the sickly-sweet embrace of death to take all the pain away. Wait – what? When did I become a manlier version of the singer from HIM? Fuck this shit. I pick the gun up, aim at my temple, and squeeze.

* * * * * * *

Huh. Somebody got it right with the bright light bullshit. It’s like being an inch and a half away from the sun. Must be an after-effect of the bullet tearing my brain apart. Neat stuff. I’m wondering what happens – wait, how can I still be conscious if I’m dead?

FUCK. It didn’t work.

I’m probably looking into the lights over my hospital bed right now. Someone must be operating on the side of my head, trying to remove the projectile. My parents must be in the waiting room.

This is how it would go. My dad has one hand on my mom’s right leg – he’s always on that side – and the other hand on his cell, getting a therapist all lined up for me. My mom’s crying, face in hands, wondering “What in the world could have pushed him to such an extreme?” The nurse at the front desk is watching them in empathy, thinking, “Fuckin’ kids these days.” It’s a male nurse. He’s overweight, which I think is funny somehow.

I open my eyes to see what exactly is going on, and the light dissipates. Now I’m looking up into a very pure, blue sky. No sun in sight, but it’s very warm and bright here. Where the hell am I?

I sit up at a slight angle, using my arms to brace myself. I look around and notice that my surroundings are distinctly…fluffy. Like I’m sitting inside a pillow. I’m scratching my head in disbelief and I find the wound on the right side. No blood comes off on my hand, which I think is odd. It feels like the forces of nature created a miniature Grand Canyon on my person. I hate the Grand Canyon.

When I’m done being fascinatingly horrified with my boo-boo, I stand up and see that there are people all around me, some seated just as I was, some standing, looking confused like I am now, and some walking ahead to some distant point on the horizon. Well all right then. Let’s see what goes on here.

The fluff is about ankle deep, but it doesn’t obstruct my movement. I wonder what’s underneath it? I dig through what I can, and the “ground” below is soft and kind of squishy. Definitely not dirt. Or anything else that ground should be made of.

A few minutes into my walk, I see what looks like a tollbooth up ahead, surrounded by tall, regal looking wrought-iron fence. Maximum-security type stuff, but for rich folks. I start to get closer to the booth, but notice a line of exorbitant proportions is forming in front of me. I join it. And wait.

An older gentleman wearing a hospital gown and bracelet gets in line behind me. From what I can tell he has no grotesque injuries, which may explain why he is staring at mine with soft intent and sadness. I ignore him.

The line moves relatively quickly, and just as I am becoming second in line to step up to the booth, the old man taps me on the shoulder.

“Did you do that?” he asks, gesturing toward my gaping hole.

I’m thinking intently about lying to him, saying I was the unlucky victim of an ill-advised game of Russian roulette because me and my drunken pals were all bored, but I decide not to. Why would he care anyway?

“Yeah, I did it.” He looks disappointed. “What? I had my reasons, and that should be more than good enough for you. You don’t even know what happened, so why don’t you just lay off?”

He turns away, but I can’t tell if it’s because he is chastened or if he thinks he is wasting his time on the young whippersnapper in front of him.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” I ask him.

“It was my time,” he says. He shakes his head unhappily. “I’d was in the hospital for about a month, managing to hang on. For a second even I thought I might make it.” He looks down at his feet. “We were wrong. We were all wrong.”

I raise my eyebrows at the old man, and since he continues to stare sadly at his feet, I decide not to bother and turn around just in time to see that my time at the tollbooth has come. I step forward.

The curiously dressed man in the window doesn’t even bother to raise his head from the list he is poring over. “Name?” he says, in a voice that is unfittingly high pitched.

I squint curiously at him before answering. “Jake Douglass.”

He makes a check mark on the list and looks up at me, and now I’m face to face with what appears to be a 13-year-old boy. Who has wings. You have no idea how confused I am right now. This has to be a dream. Do people dream when they die?

“You know,” he says sternly, “you really shouldn’t have done that. Not going to do you any favors up here, that’s for sure.”

I can’t take this kid seriously. He’s trying to lecture me while wearing fairy wings? For real?

He consults the list again. “All right. Well you’re apparently going in for a talk before we send you off to your final destination. Not sure why, but don’t question the boss.” He points slightly behind me. “Take that hallway to the second door from the end.”

I turn and look, and there is indeed a hallway, just as fluffy as the rest of my surroundings. It looks more like a tunnel, considering that we aren’t actually in a building, as far as I can tell.

“Hang on a second,” I say, turning back to him. He looks perturbed that I haven’t just obeyed the instructions and gotten on with it. “You said, ‘up here.’ Where exactly is ‘up here?’”

He looks at me, puzzled, like I should obviously know the answer to my own question, and so turns once again to the list in front of him for the answer. “Aha, that would explain it. Instead of going to the second door from the end, head all the way to the end of the hall. Go on now. I’m not the one who can help you.”

“No, wait, what would explain it?” He must be tired of me by now. He makes a motion to someone behind me and suddenly I find myself accompanied by two men wearing white suits and sunglasses. The old man is watching me now, shaking his head.

“What, are you going to just take this sitting down?” I ask him. “Why is everyone so judgmental? Who are you people? What the HELL is going on here?”

Everything has stopped. I’m facedown in the fluff, one of the men in a white suit and sunglasses is holding me down using some kind of MMA tactic that I don’t know how to wrest myself from. The other man gets down on one knee and brings his face uncomfortably close to mine.

“Listen,” he says slowly. “We don’t want any of that kind of language up here, you got that? Now if you please, we would like to escort you to the door at the end of the hall without any further incident. How does that sound?”

I’m being lifted up before I have a chance to respond, and the two men are ushering me down the hallway to the door at the end. There are doors only on one side of the hallway, random hard points emerging from an otherwise soft, cushy environment. Like these men in white suits.

We’ve reached the door. One of the men opens it and gestures inside to a completely dark room. At the risk of ending up on the ground once again, I have decided to comply this time, and so enter the room. The door shuts gently behind me.

A single, tiny light source emerges from the ceiling and illuminates what appears to be a very comfortable chair in front of me, resting atop a short pillar of fluff. The stuff is literally everywhere. I presume this is a signal, so I sit down in the chair.

The chair is indeed very cushy. Just as I settle in, the entire room is awash in light. I cram my eyelids closed in an effort to protect my retinas, even shielding them with one arm while I grip the chair in discomfort.

“Good afternoon, Jake,” I hear a voice in front of me say.

The light is still there. “Uh…hi there,” I say, still squinting.

Finally the brightness subsides, and when my eyes are done adjusting I see another man in a white suit seated behind a desk about five feet in front of me. This one isn’t wearing any sunglasses. He’s looking at me, smiling a very kind smile. I have no idea why, but he does have a pretty awesome beard.

“Thank you, I appreciate that,” he says. He looks down at the desk.

I look around me, puzzled. He appreciates what? I guess he must have one of those Bluetooth earbud things and is talking to someone on the phone.

Without looking up, he issues a single laugh of amusement. “No, no, we don’t use those up here. No need.”

Interesting. I think I know what’s going on now. Go fuck yourself, beard guy.

He looks up at me, and I can see nothing but fury in the face that used to be smiling at me. Now he’s looking back down at the desk in front of him. He appears to be consulting some kind of folder.

“You guys are big on lists and stuff here, huh?”

“Jake, you shouldn’t be so happy with yourself considering your past actions, but then again you really don’t have any idea what is going on here. So, I don’t expect that I will find you quaking in your boots like some of the people we get up here.”

“Damn straight you won’t.” I point at him sternly. “I don’t know what you jokers are trying to get away with, but you can bet your fancy wardrobe I’m not just going to go along with it.”

“Trust me, Jake, we aren’t trying, anything. We’ve been doing this forever. I would say since the beginning of time, but since I was the one who began time, that would technically be incorrect.”

I laugh at his last comment. “How does one ‘begin’ time, might I ask?” I shake my head incredulously. “I don’t know what you’re on, dude, but seriously, I just want to get out of here.”

He looks up from the desk and smiles at me. “And once we are done here I would be more than happy to grant that request. We just have a few things to go over.”

He stands up and walks around the desk to get closer to me, bringing the chair along with him. He sets it down in front of me and sits.

“So let’s start off with an introduction,” he says. “I don’t think it’s quite fair to you that I know everything about you and you know nothing about me.”

“I know you apparently read minds,” I say wryly. I’m taking this very well, considering.

“Indeed you are,” he says. “This is going to be a little bit hard for you to understand, considering your beliefs – or lack thereof – but I will put it very shortly.” He smiles broadly at me. “Jake, I’m God.”

I just stare at him for a moment. Then I burst into laughter.

“Yeah, sure, whatever you say buddy.” I look around. “Next thing you know Elvis and Santa are going to come through that door over there holding hands and then Nicholas Cage is going to develop a new facial expression.” That strikes me as being even funnier, so I laugh some more.

“I’m glad you find humor in all this,” he says. “Truth is, you committed suicide, and as such you have a lot to answer for. Not only that, but you spent the last seven years of your life denouncing my existence.” He shakes his head. “Can’t say I’m a fan, Jake.”

“Oh, please. You honestly expect me to believe that since you sit me down in a fluffy room and ‘read my mind’ and have winged 13-year olds working for you that you’re a god, huh?”

“Not a god, the God.”

“Yuh-huh.”

“Jake, sooner or later you will realize I’m telling you the truth.”

“No, sooner or later I will probably wake up from this dream on a hospital bed with my friends and family distraught in the lobby and the police waiting to take me away to serve my time for trying to do myself a huge favor.”

“If that’s what you want I can certainly give you a second chance to redeem yourself and dedicate your life to my service.”

“To your service, huh? Is that service like in the fast food industry or service like, ‘Congratulations, here is your ball and chain and here is where you will be sitting, now row the goddam boat?’”

“Row the what boat?”

“Oh knock it off and answer my questions.”

He stands up and clasps his hands behind his back. “Very well. What is it exactly that you would like to know?”

“I want to know how I can get out of this stupid dream and just die and get it over with.”

He chuckles, then starts pacing the floor in front of me. “Well, Jake, for starters this isn’t a dream. And you are dead. Very much so, in fact. You’re in Heaven, my kingdom.”

I tilt my head in disbelief. “Look man, I know full well this is a dream. Why do you think this doesn’t hurt?” I gesture to my head wound. “You never feel pain in dreams, and if this sucker doesn’t hurt then this can’t possibly be reality.”

The smug look I’m giving him is suddenly interrupted by the absolute most unpleasant sensation I have ever felt – immense, skyrocketing pain grips my head, and I fall out of the chair, screaming.

“This pain?” he asks, just barely audible over my racket. “I’ve been gracious enough to relieve you of it since you’ve been here. And I will continue to do so if you agree to cooperate.” He leans down to me, as I am now writhing in the fluff. “What do you say?”

“YES! FINE!” I yell, and the pain stops instantaneously. I stay on the ground a moment, catching my breath, and then transition to a sitting position and look up at him. “What the hell, man?”

“I do what I must,” he says. “Please have a seat back in the chair.” I oblige, and he stands before me, arms crossed. “Suspend your disbelief for a moment, Jake, and you will know the truth.”

“If you are really God, then you already know that nothing you say or do is really going to make me believe,” I say. “Might as well give it up now, champ.”

“As supportive as that is, I don’t think I will.”

“Suit yourself. Hope you don’t mind having your time wasted.”

“Not particularly, no.”

I scoff. “Oh, that’s right, I’m sorry. You created time. You have as much of it as you could possibly need, right?”

“Pretty much, yes.”

“Fine.” I cross my arms and lean back in the chair. “You give this kind of treatment to all the Atheists who end up here?”

“Yes, I do. I feel that it is important to explain to them exactly where they went wrong and give them a chance to redeem themselves, like I stated earlier.”

“Well to be honest I don’t think it’s too hard to figure out where I ‘went wrong,’ but sure. Go to town.”

He laughs. “You’re right Jake. So I’ll spare you the lecture, since you won’t appreciate it anyway, I don’t think. I’ll cut right to the chase.”

Finally.

“You have a choice to make,” he says. “The first option is that you return to Earth. You can accept the consequences of your actions and lead a fuller, better life in service to and belief in me.”

“Sounds super awesome.”

He ignores my sarcasm. “The second option is far less pleasant, and I think you might know what it already is.”

Interesting. “So first you’re going to have to tell me how facing the people who love me and going through mindless therapy that will, inevitably, just fuck me up more, is going to be pleasant, and then you’re going to have to elaborate on that second option.”

He’s either ignoring the f-bomb that I dropped or he didn’t hear it, because he’s not reacting this time.

“I’m ignoring it.”

Well then there we go.

“The second option is for me to send you to the underworld, where you will be forced into painful, never-ending manual labor in the service of the fallen angel, Lucifer.”

“So how is that different from you bringing me back to life, if I am in fact dead? Way it seems to me, I’d just be in your service – probably equally painful – until I died naturally, wouldn’t I?”

“If that’s the way you choose to look at it, then yes. Or you could view it as an opportunity to enrich your life and the lives of others around you, and then retire to the comfort of my kingdom when you pass away of old age.”

“So this is basically just a glorified old folks’ home then, huh?”

“Not quite. We do have a younger population up here as well.”

“Interesting. What’s the deal with bringing babies and people in their 20’s up here then, huh? Why not let them keep living?”

“It’s not up to me, Jake.” He sits back down in his chair, crossing his right leg over his left. “I know what’s going to happen, but I don’t make it happen. My direct influence ended after I created the universe.”

“So then you just watch with your popcorn while countries are turned to rubble and entire civilizations are lost to genocide?”

“I made a decision, Jake. I created humans to be a thinking species capable of walking on both sides of the moral line. I decided to let humanity figure out how to solve these problems on its own, and in turn make itself stronger and better.”

“Have you noticed that it’s not quite working?”

“Consider that your species has only been around for a few thousand years, Jake,” he says. “The evolution of the collective psyche takes much longer than that.”

I think about this for a second. “Like how long? Hundreds of millions of years or something?”

He smiles. “We’ll find out someday.”

“Oh, sure.”

He walks back over to the desk, still smiling, and picks up what he was looking at earlier. It’s a file folder. It has my name on the front.

“What’s that? My file?”

“Yes Jake.” He leans down and opens up one of the desk drawers, taking out a long, thin wooden box with no markings on it. “Do you know what this is?”

I roll my eyes at him. “Harry Potter’s wand?”

“No, Jake, but –”

“Voldemort’s wand? He’s gonna be pissed, you know.”

He shoots me a look that transmits nothing but “I’m fed up with you” and opens the box, pulling out a very shiny silver pen.

“Drew Rosenhaus’s wand?”

“This is the pen I use to judge people with, Jake.”

Well that’s not high and mighty of him at all.

He ignores me again. “I am going to use this pen to send you to the appropriate place after our conversation is over. It’s up to you. Is this file going to get bigger, or not?”

I decide that I am finally fed up with all of this. “So how many people do you pull this shit on during the course of a day? Because in all honesty, I’m surprised I lasted this long without blowing a gasket and ruining that fancy suit of yours.”

“Jake, you couldn’t harm me with the most powerful weapons mankind has ever created.”

Yeah well read this thought, asshole. I’m willing to try. Your fun is over.

I stand up from the chair and start run-walking toward him, and he doesn’t make an attempt to move or go for some kind of object with which to bludgeon me. The chair would do nicely.

I’m a foot away from him now, and I cock back my right fist. I put all my power and weight behind the punch I throw at him.

The room is full of men in white suits, all of them wearing sunglasses except for the one with the beard. I’m buried in a pile of them. Now I’m on my feet, being dragged out the door and back down the hallway and now to the right.

Now I’m being unceremoniously dumped down some kind of shaft. It looks like an old-fashioned well you would find in a Victorian backyard. It’s really hot in here.

Funny. I can’t seem to recall whether or not that punch actually landed.