I don't think I'll ever get used to the sight or smell of Cherubim. If you think they look like dewy-eyed infant Cupids with butterfly wings, you'll be in for one hell of a shock when you die. If you've studied ancient art, and know that the old Hebrews depicted them as human-headed lions, you're a little warmer. You might not even soil yourself in terror when you first see one.
But the smell-oh, the smell. I avoid Cherubim whenever
possible, which is easy; I don't think they like us very much.
But after sixteen years of eternal paradise in Heaven, I was
ready to submit my Application for Permission to Reincarnate
(Form R-3665), which of course meant I would have to meet with an
administrative Cherub. I needed one to sign my application. Her
office was in one of those huge basilicas on the west end of
Enoch Street. The inside was a lot like the outside-checkerboard
walls of alternating black-and-white bricks, twisted pillars,
stained-glass windows. There was an El Greco in the vestibule,
probably one of the last he did on velvet before he started
painting trucks and vans. Nixon tells me he's back to plain old
oil-on-canvas now. Nixon wants to reincarnate, too. I can't blame
him-who else in his shoes wouldn't want to go back and try to do
things over? He's applied twice and been voted down both times.
Seems too many people want him to stay here. Kennedy says he
should be happy about this, that it means all is forgiven, that
everybody who remembers him wants to keep him kicking around
somewhere in their afterlife. He says Nixon should be happy. Yes,
they're the best of friends now, and that's not the oddest
pairing you're going to see, not by far. Wait until you find out
who Marie Antoinette is sleeping with. Anyway, I wasn't worried
about my own application-unlike Nixon, I led an entirely private
life, and I was even something of an introvert with my own
friends and family, so I figured my application should breeze
through the Consensus phase without a hitch. Why should anyone
vote to keep me here? I walked through the nave of the basilica
and found the appropriate office, one of several boxy,
high-ceilinged rooms built into the wide aisles. I knocked twice
and read the golden letters pegged into the acacia-wood door:
Diolimodraza Phloxopha
Director of Regressive Transmigrational Affairs, Lower
Hierosolyma Division
The door swung inward as if by telekinesis; I stepped inside the
office. The smell was the first thing I had to pretend not to
notice. How to describe the smell of Cherubim-perhaps like the
steam of sugar, blood and spices boiling in a saucepan, with
undercurrents of ozone and sulphur and things never before
experienced by your olfactory senses? That's the best I can come
up with. As for its physical appearance, I would suggest you
picture a sea-cucumber or a magnified germ or whatever seems most
horrifically polypoid and alien to your imagination, languidly
spread over roughly the amount of ground that four parked station
wagons would cover, colored in bright variegated bands, with a
human torso five or six times the size of your own body growing
out of it. Picture ropy black hair, fingernails that could plough
the frozen earth of Siberia with an idle scratch, skin the color
and texture of a shark's hide. Finish off your mental image with
three pairs of thin, membranous, oar-shaped extensions the length
of city-blocks hanging from between its shoulder blades. They're
wings, I guess; they spread out like sails when the creatures
take flight. One time, I asked my girlfriend, who has been a
resident of Heaven since 206 A.D., why Cherubim (and Seraphim,
supposedly-but I've never seen a Seraph and don't know anyone who
has) are so monstrous and grotesque. She said, "Because that's
what the Savior thought they should look like when he first
imagined Heaven." Then, as is customary, we looked northward and
thanked the Savior for being so clever and considerate as to have
thought up a blissful afterlife for everyone. Her answer made
sense. It's easy to forget that Heaven was originally just one
man's personal, idiosyncratic vision. Most of us have adhered to
his conventions in our expansion and development of the place. I
drove all thoughts of the Cherub's horrific smell from my mind.
If you want to know what else I had to pretend not to notice,
remember that I was faced with a bare female torso about ten feet
long from belly to shoulder-use your powers of deduction. I
handed my filled-out application form to a groping pseudopod that
extended from her amorphous lower half and explained that I
wished to be reincarnated.
"I'll need to ask you a few questions before I approve your request," she said. The voices of Cherubim are actually quite pleasant. They sound like lots of children talking all at once. "First of all, do you understand exactly where you are, and what Heaven is?"
I sat down in a mahogany chair and nodded, reciting the correct answer, which I had memorized weeks ago:
"Yes. I am in Heaven, and Heaven is a quantum bubble of variable-state super-reality created by the Savior and maintained by the collective human psyche." A mouthful, to be sure, but it was what they wanted to hear.
She crossed her arms and leaned over me, as if conducting an
interrogation. "And do you understand what will happen to you if
you return to the sequential-state material universe?"
"Yes," I said, ready with the second expected answer. "I will
be a miserable plaything of the Demiurge, He Who Created All
Things But Cares Not How They Suffer." I pictured Nixon having to
undergo this ritualistic call-and-response screening process
twice and almost laughed out loud.
"And why would you want to go through all that again..." She
glanced down at my application and read my name. "...Mr.
Baronian?"
"Well, because I rather liked it down there, and I'd like to go back and see what's happened in the years I've been away, and...well, there were some books I never got around to reading, and I always wanted to see Armenia, and-I loved my two sons, but I thought it would be nice to have a daughter someday." I felt I was starting to babble, but I'd wanted to get this off my chest for a while. "I mean...I love it here, but everybody's so empowered, so in control of everything, nothing's a surprise anymore. And I guess I miss being surprised. This might sound strange, but I miss pain, too -- not so much that I miss the actual hurting part of it, but I miss feeling like I'm strong enough to endure hardship. There's no hardship here. I miss having limits to test and failures to learn from and I miss the exhilaration that comes from having your life take a turn for the better after it's been absolutely rotten for the longest time. I mean-not to knock what the Savior's done for us, or anything but--"
The Cherub held her arms out. "Are you sure? Have you taken
the time to appreciate what's been made available to you here?
We've got this wonderful marbled city with its thousands of
gleaming spires and shining domes--"
"-I have no complaints about Heaven. It is
wonderful. It's just that I--"
"-Gardens beneath which rivers flow, streets paved with gold,
endless hills and valleys full of milk and honey, all of your
ancestors and heroes and loved ones--"
"You're right, you're right, and I can't help but feel like an
ingrate, but I want to go back."
"You know, if you get on the waiting list now, you could get
an endowment of seventy-two black-eyed virgins in less than fifty
years."
"I'll take my chances with the living," I said. "Sure,
rejection hurts,but it's such a thrill when a woman says
yes because she wants to, not because she was brought
into existence for the sole purpose of bringing me pleasure."
The Cherub sighed, exasperated with my thick-headedness.
Cherubim could never understand why anyone would want to leave
Heaven. Of course they couldn't-they were the creations of the
Savior, completely subservient to his will, and when all is said
and done, this place is his baby. I think he might take it a bit
personally when we ask to reincarnate. But he is gracious, very
gracious-his approval is the final step in the application
process, and he has never, ever vetoed a request. I smiled as the
Cherub signed my form and stamped it with her seal. I thanked her
profusely. I left the basilica with a spring in my step.
"So, you're leaving." Galeria was upset. She didn't want me to
reincarnate, although she had known my wishes to do so since the
day we met, back at a mixer for Imperial Romans and
Post-Industrial Westerners. Heaven's social calendar is always
packed. "I don't know what to say," I said. "I've tried to ignore
it for sixteen years, but the feeling just won't go away. I've
got to go back to Earth.
Something is calling me down there. I'm sorry."
"But why? Why would you want to go back to that unhappy place
when you've got all this?" She swept her arm out towards the
sparkling city scape behind them, then curled it around my neck
and drew me closer. "...And me?"
She was a lovely girl, and despite the cultural and age differences-she was almost two thousand years older than me, but this being Heaven, she didn't look a day over twenty-I was deeply attached to her. But a force more powerful than romantic love had hold of me. "I don't think I can ever explain it quite properly. It's a grim world, always lousy with war, poverty, jealousy, ignorance, all sorts of awful things, but there's something about it that I just haven't been able to find here. Maybe I'm just being sentimental, attaching more value to material things just because of their impermanence. Maybe it's that constant contrast between joy and tragedy that gets to me. I just have to go back." I looked into her eyes. "And I think you should, too."
She recoiled. "No, that's out of the question. How can you
even suggest such a thing?"
"You've been away so long, I don't think you remember how
beautiful life on Earth can be even in the worst of times."
"Oh, don't feed me that garbage. You sound just like that
idiot Baudelaire. Maybe it's easy for you to enjoy life down
there, but you don't know what it was like for me." She
shuddered. "Don't you see? Eighteen hundred years later and the
memories still bother me. You try being a slave.
You go live where the concept of sanitation hasn't been
invented. You see what it's like to die during
childbirth. Then tell me how badly you want to go
back."
I shrugged. "All that and worse could easily happen to me. I know I'm taking a gamble."
"If it does, you'll come back feeling very different about
your precious little Earth. I promise you that. And don't expect
to find me waiting for you. Merobodus the Red keeps asking if I'm
spoken for, and up until now, I've been telling him yes."
"I understand," I said quietly. It was a moot point anyway;
every memory I had accumulated as John Philip Baronian would
permanently, irreversibly evaporate as soon as I reincarnated. I
would become a blank slate once more. An empty canvas. When I
came back, I wouldn't remember her, and she wouldn't recognize
me.
"Well," she said, standing up, "I guess this is good-bye." But
she didn't wait for me to say anything else. She just walked
away. I stood up and wanted to call out to her, the words bubbled
up to my throat but I couldn't let them out. I sat back down and
looked at the city, telling myself that it was okay, that she
would get over it, that I had to do this for myself even if it
meant hurting her.
A week later, my application came back denied. I have to wait
three years before I can apply again. It was that damn Consensus
phase that foiled me -- to my utter bewilderment, ten thousand
people voted to overrule my desire to reincarnate. That's all it
takes. I couldn't believe it. I was a prisoner of Heaven. I found
out later that Galeria had convinced Nixon to help her get me to
stay. The two of them did some Machiavellian plotting behind my
back and eventually decided that Nixon should use his connections
to round up enough votes to get my application rejected. They
didn't even tell me after the fact -- I had to find out from
Saladin, of all people. His vote was solicited and he felt I had
a right to know. I forgave them both. That's what we're supposed
to do around here.
I'm not sure why Nixon went to so much trouble to help Galeria.
It's not like he and I are close friends, we just happen to
travel in the same social circles. There's no reason he should
care so badly whether I stay or leave. I think he only did it
because he was bitter about his own applications being rejected
twice.
A few months later, things were pretty much back to normal.
Galeria pretended like nothing happened and changed the subject
whenever I talked about applying to reincarnate again when the
three years were up. After a while I stopped mentioning it. One
day I was walking down Mahalaleel Lane, towards the docks, alone.
It was early in the morning and there wasn't anybody else around.
A cool breeze was blowing from the north and there was a thick
fog cover. The weather had been brisk and soupy for days; I
wondered what was going on with the Climate Planning Committee.
And then I heard a combustive roar far behind me, and I turned to
see a convertible, fire-engine red Alfa Romeo tearing down the
road. It was the Savior's car, I recognized it immediately. The
Savior loved cars. I watched the car come closer and closer. He
was driving very fast. A strange impulse came to me and I hid
myself behind one of the big cedar trees that lined the road. I
knelt and picked up a stone. I waited for the car to come within
range and when it did, I stood up and hurled the stone at the
Savior's windshield. It was a direct hit. Radiating cracks
blossomed on the safety glass like a jagged spider web. Brakes
squealed; tires smoked. The car screeched to a sudden halt a few
dozen meters ahead. The Savior turned his head and started to
back up slowly. I just stood there. When he got to where the
stone had hit, he saw me, lurking guiltily behind the tree. I
stared back at him, still and dumb as a statue. What could I
possibly say? I didn't know why I'd done what I did. He shifted
out of reverse, smiled, winked at me, and sped away.