The Waiting Room
Scott Pomfret
A squat lumpy figure flung the door wide and told the Pope to get his ass out of the rain. He was dressed in wrinkled khakis, tassled loafers, and a stained polo shirt sporting the frozen hourglass that was Purgatory’s logo.
“Angels’ tears,” he said. “Never stops. They’re a bunch of goddamn crybabies, pardon my French. Welcome to Heaven’s Waiting Room. I’m Bob.”
“I’m the Pope,” the Pope said reluctantly, stepping across the threshold as if he were stepping into a Venetian gondola. “Or at least I was the Pope. There’s a new Pope.”
Bob slapped a manila folder against his thigh with such vehemence that its entire contents spilled to the floor.
“Of course, there is! You think I don’t watch the smoke from the chimneys? The TV stations carry it live here. Even when there’s no election. Smoke rising from the Vatican chimney. It gets great ratings, since it’s the only show we’ve got.”
Bob bent to retrieve the scattered papers. His asscrack gaped like the maw of some pigment-free, deep-underwater beast that had never seen the light of day. The Pope touched a rose-scented handkerchief to his lips.
“Sorry,” Bob said. “Didn’t mean to jump down your throat.”
“I’m getting used to indignity,” the Pope whispered.
“Know just how you feel. I remember my own first day in Purgatory. The sense of disappointment. The frustrated ambition. You see, I was an angel once.”
Bob admitted that he’d stayed strictly neutral during Lucifer’s rebellion, and as soon as He had dispatched the Archfiend, the Good Lord couldn’t kick Bob and his lukewarm, play-it-safe kind out of Heaven fast enough. In the eyes of the Almighty, neutrality was complicity. Sycophants only need apply. “Neither good enough for Heaven nor bad enough for Hell, so here I am,” Bob said cheerfully.
“May I ask what it is you do around here, please?” the Pope asked. Based primarily on a series of bring-Michaelangelo-to-life parties at the Vatican, during which cardinals dressed the young novice priests in linen, girt them with gold, and supplied them with wings that were to die for, the Pope had developed certain preconceived notions of how an angel ought to appear. Being neither beautiful nor awesome, Bob didn’t fit the mold. “Are you the … the doorman?”
“I’m the CEO.”
“The CEO? I see.”
“I set the inmates’ schedules, issue time off, keep track of millennia served, and ensure the inmates produced sufficient wailing and gnashing of teeth, which is the fuel to Hell’s everlasting fire and Purgatory’s only growth industry.”
“Are you … are you serious?”
“Well, I also like to greet the newbies.” Bob leafed through the manila folder, which the Pope could now see contained his Holiness’s personnel file. “We don’t get many popes.”
“I suppose they usually go straight to Heaven.”
Bob laughed. “Hardly.” He flicked away his cigarette butt. “You’re lucky you copped a plea.”
“My lawyer advised me that given the, um, merde, that went down during my papacy, it was better to do my time and thank the Almighty for His grace and mercy. Only he used another word for merde.”
“Well, grab your merde and follow me. You’ll have to carry your own bags. I’d love to help you out, but I have a bad back.”
The Pope followed Bob, who showed no sign of any physical impairment, into a vast warehouse divided into endless cubicles serviced by a single coffee-stained kitchenette the size of a phone booth and a restroom that stank of some unfortunate and cataclysmic bowel movement. Within the cubicles, inmates were wailing and gnashing with little enthusiasm, but when they saw Bob, they picked up the pace and volume.
Bob introduced the Pope to his roommate, a handsome young man named Muhammed, and instructed him to unload his bags. Later, Bob explained, he’d have to inspect them for contraband, but for now, he invited the Pope to join him in his private quarters.
The Pope didn’t want to be rude. Being a rookie, he wasn’t sure how precarious his standing in Purgatory was. He imagined that at any moment, a trapdoor could open and spill him into an everlasting sea of fire, or at a minimum that a lack of graciousness toward Bob could lead to a few centuries tacked on to the end of his sentence. And yet, he did prefer a more, well, cultivated society.
“Give me five minutes to freshen up.”
“We got all the time in the world. Do you know how long eternity is?”
The Pope shook his head.
“Tell him, Muhammed.”
As if reciting a catechism, Muhammed said, “If you took every particle of sand and dirt of which this earth is made, and counted them all, and paused a hundred years between the counting of each particle, then, when all were finally counted, Eternity would be just as long as when you first began.”
“Exactly.” Bob clapped Muhammed on the back. His oversized wings sent the poor man sprawling. “See you in five, your Popeness.”
When Bob was gone, the Pope helped Muhammed to his feet.
“He doesn’t like Muslims,” Muhammed said.
“I’m sorry.”
“I could tell right from the start. Islamic angels have rainbow-colored wings, not white.”
“Well, you look like an angel to me,” the Pope said. He winked and copped a feel of Muhammed’s fine firm ass. Though discomfited, Muhammed said thank you, because unmitigated vanity was what had landed him in Purgatory in the first place.
***
Bob’s apartment looked like a tired bachelor pad from the Seventies: bean bag chair leaking little white seeds, wall-to-wall shag carpet, and a bench press in the corner being used as a clotheshorse. Fetching a couple of Buds from his dorm refrigerator, Bob immediately began badgering the Pope to admit that he’d had a bat phone to the Almighty during his tenure.
“What’s He like? Has He changed? Don’t sugarcoat it. I know how it is. Remember, I used to have put up with His shit, too.”
The Pope tried to convince Bob that his connection to God had been rather more ephemeral.
“Come on, Pope! There must be more to it. You can tell me. I’m Bob. I used to be an angel. People used to tell me things all the time, even their innermost secrets.”
“Sometimes He just … whistled.”
“Whistled?”
The Pope nodded. “God’s entire repertoire consists of two songs. Really, one and a half. There Was a Wee Devil Come Over the Wall and the first few bars of Trot, Trot, My Pony.”
“Not Handel?”
“God knows, I never heard it,” said the Pope.
The blessed alcohol wrought its magic. The Pope’s despair simply melted away. Which was a good thing because everyone knew despair was the mother of all other sins and could get a soul whisked Down Under in a heartbeat.
“Hey, Bob,” the Pope asked. “Ya got another brewski?”
***
Bob confided that he had every reason to believe the Almighty would grant him a reprieve and soon. Indeed, he’d already undertaken specific steps to expedite the process.
The first thing, he said, was to increase his name recognition.
“Whoever heard of Bob the Angel?” he asked. “Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael, Michael--those guys had press agents. Me? I never really cared for fame. That wasn’t what it’s all about. But I see that’s cost me.”
“That’s true. I never heard of you, and I was the Pope.”
“Exactly. You’d have been my natural audience. Even now. So give a brother a hand. Get that bat phone of yours working again and put in a good word to the Big Guy.”
“There was no bat phone.”
Bob winked, as if they both knew there was a bat phone, but--being sophisticated men of the universe--they would uphold the fiction that there never was. These types of insinuations, which were legion, made the Pope feel like he needed a shower. And, all things being equal, if there was a choice, he wouldn’t have minded showering with Muhammed.
One day, Bob held out the possibility he might issue the Pope a day pass to Heaven, but only if the Pope committed to speaking on Bob’s behalf.
“Sure, whatever,” the Pope said, though he suspected getting a taste of Heaven would only make Purgatory worse.
Bob never followed through.
“How can I be sure you’ll come back?” Bob asked. “What if you tell lies about me?”
“Telling lies will bring me back. Whether I want to or not. Maybe even send me straight Downstairs. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.”
“Not worth the risk,” Bob said, though he pretended that the success or failure of his scheme was a matter of complete indifference. “Heaven? I can take or leave it. Kind of pathetic that every loser in this place would kill himself to get into a club that doesn’t want them, or at least not yet. By the way, did you know that Monopoly, the board game, was originally created to teach an anti-capitalist lesson? Go figure. The world’s so fucked up.” He drained another Bud. “I like having you here, your Holiness. I thought you’d be some sort of stuck-up asshole.”
***
The ceaseless drone of prayers said over his soul kept the Pope awake most nights. It was like the hum of locusts or a refrigerator motor that was about to burn out. He craved a little peace and quiet, but didn’t dare complain, because he didn’t want to incite envy in the hearts of those for whom no one prayed, which itself would be an occasion of sin and a possible extension of his sentence. Because of this sensitivity, the Pope enthusiastically joined in whenever some kiss-ass with pull Upstairs and an army of praying loved ones won a pardon. Muhammed was the first in the Pope’s circle to score.
“None of my doing but God’s grace,” Muhammed mumbled when his papers came through.
“Don’t give us that pious bullshit,” the Pope jeered. He’d picked up a certain crassness of manner from Bob. “Who’d you have to blow?”
Muhammed blushed furiously, but insisted he hadn’t done a thing.
“God’s will only,” he said, “may His name be praised.”
Muhammed clearly knew how to play the game, and he was a solid joe, and seventy-two virgins awaited him in Paradise, so few inmates grudged him his good luck. Only the Pope pushed it a little too far.
“What are you going to do with female virgins?” he teased. “Hold a celestial tea party?”
Muhammed looked mortified. The other inmates roared. Bob yelled at them to get back to their wailing and gnashing of teeth, or he’d put a stern warning in their personnel files.
“Speaking of virgins,” he quipped, “they say the Virgin Mary is queen of purgatory, but I’ve never met her. What do you guys think? I mean, after all, if I had met her, she wouldn’t have stayed a virgin for long.”
The Pope winced. Not because he was offended, but because the blasphemous remark had certainly added to Bob’s sentence and reduced his chances of getting Upstairs. Even having listened to it, it occurred to the Pope, might have diminished his own chances as well.
***
To the Pope, the most troubling aspect of his banishment was not knowing the length of his sentence. At best, he could take an inventory of his earthly sins, add those in the afterlife, which he tried to keep to a minimum, multiply the whole thing by a million and add an exponent, and hope he was somewhere in the neighborhood. Sometimes he suspected that even God didn’t know the precise timing, but--because it would be a sin to doubt the Lord’s infinite power and wisdom, which could only add to whatever time the Pope was serving--the Pope kept his suspicions to himself.
But he decided to test his theory. He convinced Bob to show him the personnel files, which were kept in Bob’s dreary office in a battered file cabinet that looked as if it had been buffeted by fists. Bob wrenched open the top drawer, which screeched like a soul in torment. They first viewed Muhammed’s file. No expiration date was listed.
“If that rainbow-winged son-of-a-bitch is messing around with seventy-two virgins,” Bob complained, “I deserve a hundred forty-four at least.”
The Pope leafed through a dozen more files, none of which stated the length of the sentence in Purgatory.
“Depressing,” he said.
“Not necessarily,” said Bob. His eyes glittered with an unnatural light.
Suspicious, the Pope frowned. “Something’s up. Tell me.”
“I’ve been holding out on you.”
The Pope allowed himself to believe for a split second that he, too, had won a pardon, until Bob flourished an order on parchment and threw it in the Pope’s face. He began to dance around the tiny office, battering the walls with his enormous wings.
“In like Flynn,” he kept repeating, slapping his knee. “In like Flynn. Just you wait. I’m going to be out of here before you, and you’re the Pope!”
The parchment directed Bob to attend a preliminary hearing before the angelic host to consider his application for reinstatement.
“Don’t worry,” Bob teased, “I’ll put in a good word on your behalf with my successor.”
The Pope was gobsmacked. He hadn’t actually considered for even one second that Bob had a snowball’s chance in Hell. He couldn’t believe Saint Peter would seriously consider permitting this boob to pass the Pearly Gates.
What kind of a racket were they running in Heaven? Was it even worth the price of entry? The Pope surreptitiously extracted Bob’s personnel file from the cabinet. He expected some account of Bob’s complicit neutrality, but the only notation read, Lacks passion.
***
Among the inmates were some unexpected faces. Mother Teresa was here, Bob said, because she’d been cooking the books at her charity for years. Nixon had repented everything in the end. Stalin? Ditto. Steve Jobs? Clerical error. Antonio Scalia?
“Skin of his teeth,” Bob said, as if he personally had participated in the deliberations. “Pride. Arrogance. Lack of sympathy, empathy, and charity. Complete ignorance of the true meaning of the Gospels, let alone the Constitution.”
“So, what got him in?”
“Prayers, man. For mortals, it’s all about the prayers. People’s prayers are a kind of buoyancy. You ought to know that better than anyone. If you only heard what the angels said about you in their private councils. Burn your ears off.”
The Pope was skeptical not only of Bob’s familiarity with the private councils of the angels but also with the power of prayer. There was a robust debate in Purgatory’s kitchenette as to whether intercessions actually shortened an inmate’s sentence. The consensus view was that a prayer from one’s mother and two gold coins would get you a cup of lukewarm coffee the color of dirty dishwater. Such prayers would be heavily discounted by the Almighty, because, of course, a mother was going to say nice things about her child. A prayer from one’s mortal enemy, on the other hand? That might make His ears perk up.
“But you don’t have any--well, many--prayers said for you, Bob,” the Pope objected. “So how did you get a hearing?”
“I’m an angel. I should never have been here in the first place. Besides, I’ve got other things going for me.”
Bob motioned towards his khakis. They were freshly ironed and showed only the smallest jizz stain. His shoes were polished. He had procured a hideous braided leather belt from which the Pope recoiled in horror.
“For God’s sake, man,” the Pope suggested, “at least get a haircut.”
***
Not every inmate knew why he or she was in Purgatory. An embarrassingly large number of tortured poets and singer-songwriters were doing time, and they complained incessantly about the unfairness. They insisted they’d suffered enough on earth, so no more suffering was due, and they were forever composing lyrical petitions of unearthly beauty to free themselves. Unfortunately, there was no one to deliver them to except Bob, who smiled when he accepted them and dropped each and every one into the circular file in his office.
The Pope had hundreds of mortal sins to pay for. That was no surprise. But what caught him off guard were those that Bob said weighed most heavily in calculating his term in Purgatory. It turned out that it wasn’t the sodomy that had doomed him. It was the support of right-wing dictators in Catholic countries. That, and the slippers. The Gucci slippers. They were tacky in God’s eyes, and the Pope hadn’t expressed a trace of repentance about them on his deathbed.
Bob, on the other hand, was supremely conscious that his neutrality in Lucifer’s rebellion was his primary sin, and the first interview with the angelic host confirmed it, so Bob began to reframe his behavior in a more favorable light. He spread a revisionist meme that he hadn’t been neutral at all, but always on God’s side. His fault had been that he had moved with more deliberation than most and had sought with clear-eyed frankness the most strategic participation in God’s victory that he could, which took into account the angels’ needs and Bob’s own strengths and weaknesses. It wasn’t that he lacked passion, but that he had dispassionately weighed alternatives. Which took time. Was it Bob’s fault that God had so quickly defeated the Archfiend before Bob had been able to deploy his careful plan of allegiance?
Just as he explained this subtle reimagining of his neutrality to a group of inmates, Antonin Scalia slipped up behind Bob and shouted hallelujah, which instantly caused Bob’s wings to spread as stiffly as a teenage boy’s erection. Nixon and Scalia fell all over themselves giggling, and even the Pope couldn’t suppress a smile, because it was well-known that Bob had the idea that one of these days, the Lord was going to spring a reprieve on him like a surprise birthday party.
***
When he got notice of a second hearing before the angelic host, Bob’s hopes soared.
“This is it. I can definitely feel it. My number’s up. The first thing I do when I get to Heaven, I’m gonna ….”
The Pope suggested maybe Bob not put the cart before the horse. “How about you practice your lines for the second hearing? Ditto, your looks of contrition. They’re not at all convincing.”
“Don’t pretend you're better than me, Pope,” Bob warned. He reminded the Pope of the day just before the Pope’s death, when His Holiness had issued an encyclical releasing the unbaptized babies from limbo.
“Man, what a racket. That rush of spent souls struggling upward with an endless intolerable shriek like trapped breath makes when it escapes a balloon’s mouth. I don’t blame you, though. Those are souls that can’t help but pull for you.”
“That’s not how it was. It was a change in theology, a change in our understanding how the Lord works. Not politics.”
“Sure, it was. No doubt the Big Guy jumped on the bat phone and told you exactly what to do. Infallible, my ass. It’s so easy for a Pope. Try being a fallen angel. See where that gets you.”
***
Nothing ever happened in Purgatory. Or not nothing, but worse than nothing. That is, what happened happened so slowly, it might as well have been nothing. And it didn’t help that when a thousand years passed and someone forced the Pope to look back and face the facts, he had to concede there had been some minor incremental change. But it didn’t feel like change. He didn’t experience it as change. And these mental and spiritual bed sores were what made Purgatory so Goddamn awful.
Bob wasn’t immune. One hearing followed another. The same questions were asked. The same answers given. The same objections made. Each time, the heavenly host took his petition under advisement for further deliberations.
Bob began to cast around for other ways to increase his odds. His decided to curry favor with Purgatory’s guests. He cooked the books, issued special dispensations, and took the poets and songwriters more seriously. He engaged in a hundred acts of kindness and mercy, each of which he dutifully recorded in his ledger, with every intention of throwing it in the Almighty’s face when the time was right. Plus, he cynically calculated that sooner or later, some of these poor Purgatory bastards would make it to Heaven, and it would be good to have local allies.
“Not that I need allies. Gabriel, Raphael, Michael--they’re jealous of me, sure. But the lesser angels? I count them as friends.”
The Pope suspected that if Bob had in fact once known the lesser angels, they had long since put him out of their minds. The lesser angels surely knew which side their celestial bread was buttered on.
***
After countless centuries and no action on the part of the angelic host, Bob decided that part of the problem was that he hadn’t inspired much in the nature of timeless works of art reflecting his glory. Gabriel had The Annunciation. Michael had the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. So, Bob set to work commissioning beachy pastels from boardwalk artists in Atlantic City, which was all he could afford. He quickly discovered that even boardwalk artists were touchy and difficult and very rarely shared his expansive vision of himself. Bob railed about the injustice of it. He strongly suspected da Vinci had never given Gabriel any lip, but painted the Archangel the way the Archangel saw himself, no questions asked.
The Pope had long since accepted that putting up with Bob was a critical part of his suffering, and the more the Pope endured his host, the faster the Pope would be sprung. Still, the vendetta against the artists was a bridge too far.
Needing a vacation from Bob, the Pope ran out and hid amongst Purgatory’s uninspiring landscape. The tears poured down until he was cold, shivering, and miserable.
“Where ya been?” Bob asked when the Pope sheepishly returned to his cubicle. “You look like a drowned rat.”
“Contemplating my sins.”
“Don’t waste your time. You’ve got all eternity for that. Do you know how long eternity is?”
The Pope looked him directly in the eye and asked, “Has anyone ever told you, Bob, that you’re a complete downer?”
***
Hearings followed hearings. Rumors abounded. Decisions of the angelic host were put off again and again at the last minute. Bob was told the host had other priorities, that he shouldn’t read anything into the delays, but Bob grew increasingly brittle. The sheen left his feathers. He alternately brimmed with bitterness and hope. When the Pope observed one day in passing that theology taught that angels neither eat nor excrete and are genderless, and the gas they pass smells like the lilies of the field, Bob immediately contradicted him: “Raphael’s farts stink just like mine.”
The next day, however, Bob redoubled his efforts at sanctity. He quit smoking cold turkey. He instituted a new campaign he called KPP, or Keep Purgatory Pristine, the primary aim of which was to empty the ashtrays and the kitchenette’s trash can and to periodically hose down the lavatory. The Pope was astonished to feel in his heart the first-ever stirrings of sympathy, and his Holiness secretly developed a wan suspicion that even he was indeed capable of incremental change. Purgatory was surely having its desired effect on his immortal soul.
***
A newcomer to Purgatory approached the Pope one day and started asking questions. He said he was interested in honest opinions concerning Bob’s administration, his personal habits, and his known associates.
“Anecdotes,” he said, “would be very helpful. Salient details.”
The Pope got the visitor to admit he was an angel--the ordinary variety, nothing special, no “arch” before the title and no capital letters. He just put on his wings every day and did his job. Which was, at the moment, keeping tabs on Bob. Would the Pope mind answering a few questions?
The Pope was torn, but he did his best to tread that fine line between protecting his friend and avoiding lies, because the Pope had his own stay in Purgatory to worry about.
Less than a week later, the official announcement came from on high. Consideration of Bob’s application was suspended indefinitely.
The Pope was infinitely sorry. “I’m sorry, Bob. It must have been something I said. I’ll make it up to you, I swear it. I never had a bat phone, but if I did ….”
Bob was stony faced and gray.
Mortified, the Pope wrote Thou shalt not gossip with angels on a chalkboard until his fingers were worn stiff.
Bob croaked, “Don’t worry about, buddy.”
But that night, the Pope was woken by the rasp of a hacksaw. He rushed to Bob’s tired apartment. Already Bob’s wings were piled on the floor, and Bob was impassively studying the lavatory mirror, while his blood ran gold into the shag carpet. The Pope tried to staunch the flow, but Bob cast him against the far wall. Bob used to be an angel, after all, and the Pope’s strength was no match.
Flat on his back, the Pope watched as a single tear welled in Bob’s eye. It overflowed, ran down his cheek, and dripped from his chin. It dropped all the way down into Hell, where for just one one hundredth of a hundredth of a second, it slaked the thirst of some poor anonymous bastard, who was writhing there in agony.
No sooner had the tear touched the sufferer’s tongue then Bob was whisked away, though whether Upstairs or Downstairs depended, the Pope supposed, on one’s own particular brand of theology.
Scott Pomfret is author of Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir; Hot Sauce: A Novel; the Q Guide to Wine and Cocktails, and dozens of short stories published in, among other venues, Ecotone, The Short Story (UK), Post Road, New Orleans Review, Fiction International, and Fourteen Hills. Scott writes from the cramped confines of his Provincetown beach shack. He’s currently an MFA candidate at Emerson College at work on a comic queer Know-Nothing alternative history novel set in antebellum New Orleans. www.scottpomfret.com.