Water-Skiing Down The Styx
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Fictionwise Publications
www.fictionwise.com
Copyright (C)2001 by Kirinyaga, Inc. and Janis Ian
First published by Fictionwise, Inc.
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I lost all interest in sex after I died.
Even worse luck, I still had my appetite. After all those years of counting calories, you figure at least death will put an end to it, you know what I mean?
I'd always said that life wasn't fair, but trust me, it's got nothing on death.
We lived in Scottsdale until Mamie passed away. 44 years we were together. All right, so it wasn't a perfect marriage, but it's not like I cheated. “Cheat” is such an unflattering word. I just kind of fooled around a little, and believe me, it was for the noblest of reasons: to take the sexual pressure off her (though she never quite saw it that way). It's amazing how blind women can be about essentially gallant motives.
And I didn't drink all that much. I mean, how many times can one man apologize for driving the Buick through the back of the garage and into the swimming pool? And we were able to paint over all that stuff she swears I drew on the living room wall (though to this day I don't remember a thing). I still don't know how they got away with canceling our house insurance; I always paid the premiums on time. Well, most of ‘em, anyway.
Anyway, I'll tell you this much: If I'd known the afterlife was just going to be a continuation of August in Arizona, I'd have lived a cleaner life. Or gotten more used to Arizona.
I always meant to move back East after I lost her, but with one thing and another I never got around to it. (Especially after Vinny and Guido told me what would happen if I left before I paid Big Solly what I owed him.)
And now, here I was, stuck on the Styx, shvitzing like a ditch digger.
What had I done that was so bad? In an afterworld peopled with Agnews and Pol Pots, I was better than most. I mean, sure, I had my share of women, and maybe my neighbor's share too—but the way I saw it, I was just doing good things for their egos. And yes, like any good American citizen I cheated on my taxes—but I paid for my sins, and then some, like when the IRS nailed me with a $15,000 penalty after they found out my dependent Clarice was a goldfish and not a fifth daughter. And the Milkin deal went south before I ever had a chance to cash in. So why was I here?
Still, I always try to look on the bright side, and the hotels are fabulous, I'll give them that. Neat as a pin (fire is cleansing, after all). Problem is, there's not much to do; no cards, no books, nothing too flammable. Last time someone snuck a breviary in under their vest, they were three days putting out the flames, and the smoke made Morton's cough a lot worse.
("Cheer up,” I told him. “After all, you're in Hell. Be grateful it's only emphysema and not swine fever.” We had a lot of trouble a few months back with that, something about a bunch of men who'd been turned into pigs showing up after getting lost on a boat somewhere.)
It didn't help that there was a cross on the front of the guy's book. That really made the Big Guy mad.
It seems that for every advantage there's a disadvantage. For example, you should see the beautiful women they got sitting around the lobby. Day in, day out, showing off their legs and etceteras, just like I dreamed of when I was a boy. I feel myself growing faint with excitement, like a 14-year-old shtupper with one thing on his mind. My brain starts racing, and I check my pockets to see do I have enough tens for the tip. As I'm checking my pockets I suddenly remember that I'm not wearing any pants, and then I look down and I see to my dismay that something even more important is clearly missing, something the ladies and I had always taken for granted.
So I'm sitting there, eating this foul-tasting gruel (but thousand-calorie-a-teaspoon gruel) and ignoring all the gorgeous over-sexed demons passing by, and I'm sweating up a storm and it's dripping into my gruel, which should be sugared not salted, and finally I decide enough is enough, and I make up my mind to go complain to the head honcho—the Big Guy himself. I mean, if I have to watch an endless parade of Raquel Welch and Catherine Zeta-Jones lookalikes, at least I should be able to do something about it if the mood takes me. Which it doesn't any more, but maybe we can make a deal.
So I get up and start walking, but the molten path burns my feet, and I keep running into Slick Willie and Tricky Dicky singing this terrible off-key and off-color duet, and finally I decide that maybe I'm going to need some help, so I hunt up old Hermes, who's a pretty reasonable sort, especially for this place, which let's face it is not quite Acapulco or the Riviera or even the Catskills when you get right down to it, and I ask him the quickest way to El Diablo's palace.
“Walk right down that path,” he says, pointing to where I've just come from. “And try not to pay any attention to the entertainers. They couldn't get off the stage when they were alive, and they can't seem to do it now.”
“I tried that path,” I explain. “It's too hot.”
“This is Hell,” he replies with a chuckle. “It's supposed to be hot.”
“Isn't there any other way to get there?” I ask.
“Well, I've got to deliver the mail up and down the Styx,” he says. “There's no room on the boat, but I reckon we could rig it up to tow you.”
“People get mail on the Styx?” I say, surprised.
He nods. “Junk mail, mostly. Tons of it. Advertising luxury sedans for eight hundred dollars, and weekends in Vegas for fifty dollars, and safaris for two hundred dollars.” He pauses. “But when they go to buy the cars, they've all been sold. And Vegas is sold out, and they're sent to Mule's Foot, Texas, which has one gas station and three slaughterhouses.”
“And the safaris?”
“They're given a thirty-minute head start, and then the lions are turned loose.”
“On the tourists?”
“The brochure never says who does the hunting,” replies Hermes with smile.
“So if all the mail's like that, why deliver it at all?” I ask.
“It's one of our services,” answers Hermes, as if that explains everything. “Besides,” he adds, “they get letters every now and then.”
“Yeah?”
“Mostly from their lawyers, telling them that their cases will be appealed soon.” He shakes his head in wonderment. “You wonder why they believe them, since they're mostly all lawyers themselves, so they know how lawyers lie.”
“A man's got to believe in something,” I say.
“You wouldn't believe how many of them are here because they disbelieved in something,” he says with a chuckle.
Just then little Bill and Hil puppets come by begging for money and flatware, so we decide it's time to get the show on the road—or on the Styx, to be more accurate, so we walk down to the riverfront.
“Is it hot?” I ask as I slip my feet into the water skis.
“Well, that all depends,” says Hermes.
“On what?”
“On whether boiling water is your natural habitat or not.”
“Thanks a heap,” I mutter.
“Here,” he says, tossing me a rope after he climbs into the boat. “Hang on to this.” He stares at me. “And don't let go.”
“Uh ... what happens if I do?”
“Why don't they just swim ashore?” I ask.
“That ain't the way things work around here,” says Hermes. He guns the motor and the boat starts racing down the Styx. I find if I keep my balance, most of the boiling water splashes behind me.
After we've gone about half a mile, I look over to the shore on the left (North, South, East and West don't have much meaning here, unless you're playing bridge—and if you are, you always find that there are only 51 cards in the deck, or else there are three kings of spades).
It looks like a baseball game, except that the ball is about the size of a Volkswagen, and the bat is about six inches long, and every time the batter swings at the ball the bat breaks.
“What's going on over there?” I ask.
“Oh, they're drumming,” he says. I must have looked stumped, because he leans back over the tiller to explain. “It's a traditional game played by drummers here. Also bass players, guitarists, and teenage boys, all of whom wanted to be drummers and thought they played better than the real thing.”
Now I am really at a loss. “But there's only one stick.”
“Of course. Two sticks would even the odds. Besides, that's not the fun part. The fun part is when they hit the medicine ball with the bat, and you get that nice snare sound when it cracks in half.” He cocks an ear, and sure enough, we hear a sharp ricochet as another bat breaks. Hermes continues to wait, with a knowing look on his face that slowly turns to disappointment. He leans over confidentially and says, “The best part is when the ball connects with someone on the opposing team. Then you have that very satisfying thwonk! when the guy that's hit lands on the ground. That's the bass drum part.” He pauses to reflect, and for Hermes, he actually looks a little happy. “You can get a good concert going if you have two good teams. The really fancy ones go for cymbals, though it's harder to do in time.”
I'm not sure I want to know the answer, but I have to ask anyway. “How do they make a cymbal sound?”
“When someone hits the ground hard enough, they break a couple of bones. The long splintering sound substitutes for a cymbal, you know?”
I already know I shouldn't ask, but I go ahead. “Then what? They call out the ambulance and patch him up?”
Hermes grins. “There are no patches in Hell. Besides, the doctors have their own preserve. It's a big place run by some German guy. Unfortunately, they only get to experiment on one another now.” He pauses. “You know of any blue-eyed twin doctors? We're running short of them.” He turns back to the tiller and away we go.
A little while later I'm minding my own business when suddenly a huge hairy arm, covered with seaweed and who knows what else, reaches out of the water and tickles me where my privates used to be. “Hey!” I yell. “Stop the boat! I'm being attacked!”
Hermes slows down long enough to glance back, then hawks a huge gob of spit over the side of the boat in the direction of the arm. The water commences to bubble and steam and the arm relinquishes its hold on my ankle and withdraws. I'm a little shook up and ask if we can't pull over for a coffee—only of course the coffee here is always decaf, and the cream is powdered, but you can't have everything.
We pull into a fancy-shmancy marina with pictures of sea monsters on the pikes and I make my way out of the boat. The dock is rotted through and what with leaving my glasses behind in The Other Place, I can't see the decaying boards until I go through one. I'm frantically struggling to get myself back onto the wharf before that hand grabs me again, and Hermes is laughing like a madman, and I'm beginning to regret the whole escapade. Getting my spare parts seemed like a good idea, but not at the expense of losing the rest.
When I finally heave to, I see we're surrounded by a crowd of people dressed in yachting costumes. You know, the silly hats with pictures of anchors, and the polo shirts with other peoples’ names over the pockets? They're laughing like crazy, pointing at me, and I look down to see that I'm now wearing pants—but none of the people laughing at me are.
“Who the hell are they?” I ask.
“Critics,” answered Hermes. “They come from all over—the literary world, the film world, the theater world, and the academic world.”
“And they're laughing at the way I'm dressed?”
“They seem to be,” agreed Hermes.
“But none of them are wearing any pants!”
“They're critics. They never look at each other. Or into mirrors. They might not like what they see, and then what would they do?”
“What if you and I laughed at them?”
“They'd think you were laughing at their bon mots,” said Hermes.
“It's very strange,” I said, as the boat picked up speed.
“What is?”
“I thought Hell would be filled with Hitlers and Stalins and Caligulas and the like.”
“They're in the high-rent district,” answers Hermes.
“The high-rent district?” I repeat.
“Certainly,” he says. “They paid their dues.”
“So who's here?”
“Oh, just your run-of-the-mill sinners. Like the guy who invented the childproof bottle. Do you know how much misery he caused? Or the fellow who invented acid rock? He and his employers are all here.”
“His employers?”
Hermes nodded. “The Association of Hearing Aid Manufacturers.”
“This wasn't exactly my idea of hell,” I say.
“What was?”
I ponder for a moment before coming up with an answer. “You ever been to Duluth, Minnesota on a Tuesday afternoon?”
I pause to think, not so simple when you're moving down the Styx at high speed past a gated community with Talk Show Second Bananas painted on the doors, and finally say: “I don't know what I expected—fire and brimstone, maybe. The stench of sulfur. Plans for global domination.”
Hermes snickers. “That guy, dominate the globe? I hardly think so. It's all he can do to keep this place running on time. You know, he was 20 years late creating AIDS? It's a miracle he produced the Sexual Revolution.”
I mull on that for a while, because I am still resentful that I missed most of the sexual revolution. Sure, I went to bed with my share of middle-aged women who felt dirty about it, but there were all these teenyboppers giving it away like it was their moral duty. When Mamie finally died, I went out and found a totally different world than the one I grew up in. Prophylactics were ribbed, smooth, and jagged, and came in five sizes. There were sex clubs, joints like Plato's Retreat, that were even listed in the phone book. There were women who'd do nothing until you had your T-cells checked, and even then they preferred oral sex and hand jobs. I never could figure out if this was the Devil's work, or The Other Guy's.
“Ouch!” Hermes yells, frantically beating out the flames that spin around his wings. “Don't even think about mentioning His name. Not only will the boat sink, but His Nibs will be really pissed.”
“All right, all right,” I say. “But it's not my fault. I'm not responsible for my thoughts.”
“Sure you are. Or weren't you responsible for taking Beatrice the Bomb out for dinner and seducing her, and never mind that she was pregnant and married?”
You know, one of the annoying things about being here is how everyone has access to the insides of everyone else's heads. The other is that sympathy isn't in their lexicon. Still, I'm not out for sympathy; I'm here solely to get justice.
“So how does this work?” I ask, getting back to my main purpose as salt water spews from my mouth. “Do I have to fill in some forms and present my claim to an underling, and then wait months for The Prez to see me?”
“Nah. He's all things to all men, including prompt,” says Hermes. “Of course, he's also tardy. And tall, and short. And ... well, you get the picture
.”
“What's he like to work for?”
“Oh, he's great!” Hermes enthuses, a big smile lighting up his sallow face. “Full medical and dental, immediate SWAT team availability when we have trouble getting a tortured soul to come over—and he's terrific about maternity leave.”
“You have maternity leave?” I ask.
“What do you think—we lay eggs or something?”
I decide I don't want to think about it at all. What kind of children would these demons have, mated with alte kackers like me? After all, I can't really think that a kid by me out of the Raquel demon (once I get my penis back) will go to Harvard Medical, can I?
“Of course not,” agreed Hermes, reading my thoughts again. “Harvard Law, maybe.”
So we go into the marina restaurant and take a table, and I wince at the muzak coming from the speaker over my head. (In Hell there's always a speaker over your head in a restaurant, individualized to play your least favorite music just loud enough to keep you from having any kind of conversation. Mine is playing the Complete Works of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Hermes is wincing at Guns ‘N’ Roses’ version of Louie Louie. To each his own.)
The waitress approaches with a gimpy slither and a shake of her bottom, which is large enough to cover Montana and spill over into Idaho. I recognize her immediately.
“Sadie?”
She glares at me. “I should have known I'd run into you down here, ya bum!” She sneers and suggests we have the daily special since we're not going to get a damned thing else out of her, nosirree. With a flounce she leaves, and Hermes leans forward to get the scoop.
For once I am embarrassed. After all, it's not every day a man runs into his mistress of three years and realizes it's probably his fault that her circumstances have changed for the worse. “She's put on a little weight,” I mumble as I try to drown my sorrows in a glass of warm water.
Hermes snorts. “She's toting enough back there to cover Australia. Was she skinny when you knew her?”
I sigh. “Skinny as a toothpick, and much prettier. She could shake a stick like no one's business.”