What's Up, God?
A Romance of the Apocalypse.
Gollancz, 1995; Indigo (Gollancz) paperback 1996
Forget Sesame Street. Now come the real Muppets,
its open season for the Evangelicals, bobbing and weaving, cajoling,
gloating and jacking off at the mouth on every channel. They Who Were
Exiled to Channels 65 thru 70 on obscure cable nets broadcasting from
a hole in the ground in Combe Cheedle are now upfront on 1 thru 8.
All the preachers, pastors, primates, celestial picadors and other
spiritual plumbers. All the rabbis, mullahs and mad monks. Every sky
pilot testing their new found wings. Every sweating body who had told
us so...
AND BEHOLD! I SAW AN ANGEL COME DOWN FROM HEAVEN, HAVING THE KEY OF THE BOTTOMLESS
PIT AND A GREAT CHAIN IN HIS HAND...
For here's the rub: The Angels, as they appeared, appeared, to each nation, in
the spirit of their own tradition and practice: Quoting in accordance, in different
places, from the Old, the New Testament, the Koran, Buddhist scriptures, Tantric
and Vedic texts. The timing, however, on the eve of Xmas, culminating in the
Archangel's Speech on the Birth Day, clinched the deal for our own no-sooth sayers:
Our Truth - and all the rest is lies... As they foam and gush, their bloated,
pinched faces pocked with onanistic guilt, smoothed with cosmetic innocence,
brightened by hope, speckled with doom. And the punters, flocking like a host
of lemmings who had taken a detour back to dry land...
ALLELUIAH!!
"I sympathise," said Hoppy, two large tear drops rolling in perfect
symmetry down his cherub cheeks. "The death of all frivolity. Its hard to
take. I like a joke myself, now and again. The Archangel himself has been known
to pass a cracker, occasioanlly, at General Call. We don't endorse all these
people who claim to speak in Our Name. But we can hardly stop them, unless they
take up arms. We have had to establish minimum benchmarks for the Dispensation."
The End of Days. And suddenly every nut in the history of the whole damn schmeer
is justified. It certainly was a subdued New Year. Ring out the old, ring in
the new... The final chorus, on kazoos. The greying doyen of the grill-masters
of telly is wheeled on, old Paxman, rolling his O's around his E's. "Weeooolll,
you say you are the representative of God Almighty, the Lord, Allah, Jehovah,
whoever He might call Himself, and that the Resurrection of the Dead will occur
on April 30th, and the actual Day of Judgement will occur one week after that,
on the 7th of May, no less. Can you explain this?"
"Well, you see, Jeremy, there have been various speculations on these matters,
but we thought we owed it to the public to get things straight right at the outset,
so that there should be no arguments or conflicts on the basic principles of
the Dispensation, and so as to minimise public alarm and distress. It is a fact
that the Dead will return, physically, at the age and in the appearance each
person had when at the last moment of their full vigour, that is, people should
not fear that their infirm or dying loved ones will become a burden and a source
of pain and suffering. Ages will vary in accordance with the age of death, but
there will be no illness, no senile decay, no anguish."
"But the world will become somewhat crowded, will it not? This seems inevitable.
How far back will these, er, deceased and resurrected people go? I mean, are
we going to see the dead of our century, or back into the Middle Ages, or the
Roman and Pharaonic eras, or back all the way to the cavemen, or what?"
"All will return, Jeremy, in the course of the final week. There will be
an adjustment in stages. But the final, uh, overcrowding, as you put it, will
not last for very long."
"This is because the Judgement Day will be imminent, is that what you're
telling me, Archangel?"
"Yes, Judgement will be universal. From dawn to dusk, All Will be Judged."
"That's an awful lot of people, if I may say so, Archangel. Our own computer
predictions, taking into account uncertainties concerning past generations, and
factoring in the exponential growth of populations since prehistorical times,
have come up with a rough figure of eighty-five trillion souls. That is, eighty-five
thousand billion. Surely the Earth can't take such numbers, not to speak of the,
er, bureacratic problems you'll have in processing these, er, multitudes in the
course of one day..."
"I don't blame you for being skeptical, Jeremy. If We had Come at any previous
juncture in history it might have been easier to put Our point across. But I
assure you that We have done Our sums, and We are confident that We can handle
whatever problems that might arise. We have done this sort of thing before, after
all."
"You have? May I ask where?"
"I think I'll have to take a rain check on that one, Jeremy. But I do assure
you, We will do whatever We can to ensure the smoothest possible Transition."
"You're talking about the, er, destination of, er, each one of us, presumably,
on that Day, are you not? Are we talking about Heaven and Hell?"
"Yes, I'm afraid we are, Jeremy. Generally speaking, uh, yes."
"And all our deeds throughout our life up till that point will be, er, weighed
up and taken into consideration."
"Yes."
"Can you enlighten me on that a little, before we pass on to the, er, exact,
er, nature, if one may use that word, of this, er, Heaven and, er, Hell... By
what moral code are our deeds to be totted up, as it were? I mean, is this the
Christian code of the Middle Ages, or the Islamic code of the koran, or the 613
mitsvot of Jewish orthodoxy, or what? Morality has been historically very flexible,
is that not the case?"
"Not at all, Jeremy. You know very well that, in each generation and among
each people and each religion, and even in atheistic creeds, people do know what
is right and what is wrong. Details might differ, but the moral code, as you
call it, has remained fairly constant throughout human history. We have, as you
may have noticed, put a fair amount of effort into ensuring that it is so."
"The Ten Commandments and all that stuff?"
"Absolutely, Jeremy."
"Well, we might get to that a bit later on. I'm still not getting, I'm afraid,
a straight answer about this matter of the moral codes. The Bible, for example,
the Old Testamant, has a great deal to say about issues that are seen in quite
a different light today. Homosexuality, for example, or masturbation - onanism
- or adultery, matters of that kind, which in those days, were seen I believe
as capital offences. Surely people have a right to know on what level they are
going to be judged, or is it all just relative, as you seemed to be suggesting
there, its all according to what we feel is a, er, sin... I presume we are talking
about sins?"
"No, I still insist its not relative, Jeremy. People know what's right and
what's wrong."
"But is homosexuality a sin, then, in your eyes, or in the eyes of, er,
whoever might be the Judges on June 24th. Or masturbation? Or idolatry?"
"Do you think those are sins?"
"No, not at all. Not in my book, Mister, er, Gabriel."
"Then you clearly have nothing to worry about."
"Well, there you have it. If my guest, the Archangel Gabriel, is to be believed,
we're never going to see the year 2000, let alone 2001. That's all we have time
for this evening. Good night!"
Happy New Year! Some habits die hard. The ominous chiming of the last annual
twelve bongs of Big Ben. At Moscow's Red Square, three hours before, it turned
out, a mass drunken panic led to carnage and disaster. One thousand people trampled
to death, and subsequent breakdown of all law and order. Fanatics rushing with
flamethrowers through the streets. The city in flames by morning and the Kremlin
gutted, the Pamyat government in hiding, and an Empire of the Risen Christ proclaimed.
The next day a rival Christ declared in Saint Petersburg. And then all communications
ceased...
In New York, five hours later than London, hysterical crowds also mobbed Times
Square. A radical black group, Sons of Elijah, fired with automatic weapons into
the crowd. By morning the National Guard had moved into ghetto areas in Brooklyn
and the Bronx, and other U.S. cities. Southern Los Angeles was an open war zone.
So many excitable people. But in Rome, the entire population, swollen by millions
drifting in from other areas, swelled the plaza of Saint Peter's, in a great
silent vigil. Waiting for the Pope, who had not been seen since December 27th.
It was rumoured he had been conveyed by the Angels to the Fathership, to meet
the Lord. Commentators were already commenting on the suspicious absence of the
Deity in Whose Name all this New Dispensation was dispensing. But Pope Lucien
too, had not been seen. And preachers in Ulster were already muttering about
Catholic plots, but they seemed a minority in the circumstances...
In the Islamic world, and other Eastern nations, too, the Great Awaiting. The
masses gathered, in mosques, temples, synagogues. Prayers in a thousand and one
tongues. A hundred different civil wars interrupted. But no one bothering to
bury the dead. They piled them up, inside or outside the places of worship, and
city morgues, packing them in ice or shrouds. Ready for the Awakening...
All flesh is as grass. Happy New Year! Karen, who had been teaching young women
to assert themselves in Putney for the now defunct local council, was still with
me at that point, joined by Marek Maus and Dave Drucker and Parveen and Aisleen
and the two Martins. Drowning our confusions in the annual punchbowl with its
lethal cocktail of whiskys, brandys, gins, vodkas, ouzos, shlivovitz. Who fears
a boozy death, with Resurrection round the corner, and all the excuses building
up for the End?
"I don't remember anything about that, your honour. I was completely blotto." Will
one be able to plead insanity? Temporary or permanent? Lack of responsibility
for one's actions. On those grounds we might all get off...
But Karen was already succumbing to the spirit of the age, the month, the week
- "There is a limit, Jerry. Do you think this is all a great practical joke?
One big huge April Fool's prank? That on the Day the old man with the white beard
will just appear on the telly and say: That's all folks, we're going back home
now, and all the ships will vanish towards Alpha Centauri, leaving us all to
get on with our rotten, trivial, stupid, inconsiderate lives? Its not the way
its going to be."
What does a non-believer do, confronted with proof of the contrary? But I don't
feel any different. I don't feel anything inside has changed. I don't feel any
wrenching of the gut, no mental electricity, no shaking of the nerve ends or
the cells. Nothing but an extraordinary level of a very ordinary anxiety. Kill
me, flay me, hang me upside down over hot embers, burn me at the stake, I can't
feel a Rebirth. But Karen has, sensing the cool, firm hand of a rediscovered
destiny on her brow, a regression to her own upbringing in an obscure fundamentalist
Christian sect in Warwickshire, the Shemonites, an offshoot of a rural Arizona
community, Bible belters who were belted to the literal meaning of the Bible,
a straightjacket turned recast womb.
"You ran away from these people when you were twelve years old, Karen-kookie."
"But it turns out they were right all along."
When it hits that close to home, its serious. We lolled about, in my top floor
pitch in Iffley Road, Hammersmith, listening to ersatz Scots country-dancing
on downstairs' BBC1. Will ye no' come back again... Quite so. Dave Drucker describing
the apocalyptic scenes in Edgware. Orthodox Jewish families had gutted the High
Street, all the way down to Burnt Oak, stockpiling pickled goods and cashews.
There was not a honeyroast peanut to be found within the eruv, the religious
sphere of influence. The property market in North London had crashed, as everyone
rushed to sell in the expectation of instant transference to the Holy Land. This
had happened before in history, Messianic waves, people climbed on roofs, in
the seventeenth century, waiting for the clouds that were to waft them southeast...
"Nobody's buying airline tickets," Dave told us, "they see no
point when its all going to be free. But some people have booked rooms in hotels
for their relatives for the Resurrection. Its only practical. Come the glut."
"In the Asian community, everyone's making room," said Parveen, "you
can't find an airbed anywhere, for love or money. All the women are weaving quilts."
"In Poland, like in Russia, it doesn't matter," quipped Marek, "after
a decade of the Free Market, nobody will be able to tell the quick from the dead."
The two Martins were already blasted on my carpet, joined in unisex foreplay.
What kind of sins, indeed, are on the books, now that self-assertion, male or
female, has been pulverised?
"Is there anything that can be done, Hoppy," I asked my comedy-fan
Angel, back in the office, "between now and Doomsday?"
"Just close your eyes and think of England," he said.
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