like toasted coconut, but Sister Mary’s heart was uneasy. Was Heaven just an endless minimum wage job? Were there people here telling you what to do and how to act? Could you still be fired? Disposed of? Rejected the same way the Church had rejected her? Did they have Red Roof Inns in Heaven?
She tried to silence her doubts, but they gnawed at her brain like worms. She had always assumed that once she died she would ascend into Heaven and sit on the right hand of God the Father Almighty and the uncertainties of the world would be wiped away. But what if the doubts and uncertainties of the world were wiped away only to be replaced by another set of doubts and uncertainties? What if doubts and uncertainties were eternal? When would she finally be allowed certainty? When would the struggle cease? Because if it didn’t stop when she reached Heaven, then when?
She looked at Satan, hunched over in his seat, staring at his shoes, trying to look innocent and uninterested in the turmoil in her soul and she remembered that this was the most evil man in all of Creation. He would welcome her uncertainty. He would revel in her despair. The worms that chewed her mind were his creatures. So Sister Mary steeled her heart against him and ignored the brown tuniced workers they passed, and she put her steadfast faith again in the wisdom of her God, just in time for the electric cart to come to a stop outside a plain wooden door.
“Come on,” Satan said, and led her inside.
The reception area was bland. Anonymous waiting room furniture was lined up against the walls. Satan walked over to a pair of blonde wooden doors.
“Wait out here,” he said.
“Are you afraid I’ll see your true nature if I follow you?” Sister Mary asked, being nasty about it on principle.
“If it was up to me, I’d have you in,” Satan said. “But since we’re in Heaven, they’re going to insist on speaking True Enochian, the Celestial language. You really don’t want to hear that.”
“Because it will reveal you as a filthy liar and as the corruptor of all mankind?” Sister Mary snarled. She felt slightly conspicuous, talking so violently to Satan who had a perpetual hangdog expression on his face, but she knew that even his expression was probably some kind of trick to force her into lowering her guard and she was determined to reject him in thought, word and deed.
“No,” Satan said. “Because it makes most humans suffer brain aneurisms. But you can come in if you want.”
Mary almost said “yes” just to be contrary about it, but then she realized that if he was asking her to come in she should do the opposite.
“I will stay here,” she said. To what? To wait on him like a handmaiden? “Until my Lord no longer wants me to stay here.”
Satan shook his head and went through the double doors, while Sister Mary sat on the surprisingly comfortable furniture and pondered the turmoil in her heart.
The conference room was designed by someone who fancied himself a master strategist. Pinpoint spotlights picked up the meeting participants arranged around the enormous oval table, leaving the rest of the room deep in dramatic darkness. Satan didn’t even have to look: it was all the usual suspects, all seated in what they felt were the most intimidating power positions. To the right of the Meeting Leader Chair sat Gabriel, and to the left sat Raphael. The other seats around the table were taken by the remaining archangels: Metatron, Jegudiel and Barachiel. Phanuel, Prince of the Ophan, was a spinning wheel of fire and so he didn’t really fit in chairs. He had to hover by the wall. The Meeting Leader Chair was empty. Satan almost took it, just to be annoying, but he didn’t want to push his luck. He took the Opponent’s Chair.
Being near all of them again made Satan’s skin itch. For an eternity they had been closer than lovers, bound to one another like the fingers of a hand and then suddenly there had been rift and dissolution, The Fall and the carving up of Creation into kingdoms. Division of labor is not a concept that sits easily with eternal beings and Satan could tell that they, like him, had been warped by their temporal responsibilities. No one would make eye contact with him. No one talked to him. They all just sat and glared elsewhere. After