2O

THE GARDEN of Waiting. The tranquil and radiant place before the Heavenly Gates. A place from which souls return from time to time, when death brings them into it, and they are then told that it is not the moment, and they can go home again.

In the distance, beneath the shining cobalt sky, I saw the Newly Dead greet the Older Dead. Gathering after gathering. I saw the

embraces, heard the exclamations. Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw the dizzyingly high walls of Heaven, and Heaven's gates. This time I saw the angels, less solid than all the rest, chorus after chorus, moving through the skies, unbound and dipping down at will into the little crowds of mortals crossing the bridge. Shifting between visibility and invisibility, the angels moved, watched, drifted upwards to fade into the inexhaustible blue of the sky.

The sounds of Heaven were faint and achingly seductive as they came from beyond the walls. I could close my eyes and almost see the sapphirine colors! All songs sang the same refrain: "Come in, come here, come inside, be with us. Chaos is no more. This is Heaven."

But I was far from all this, in a little valley. I sat amid wildflowers, tiny white and yellow wildflowers, on the grass bank of the stream which all souls cross to get into Heaven, only here it seemed no more than any magnificent rushing stream. Or rather, it sang a song that said¡ªafter smoke and war, after soot and blood, after stench and pain¡ªAll streams are as magnificent as this stream.

Water sings in multiple voices as it slides over rocks and down through tiny gullies and rushes abruptly over rises in the earth so that it may again tumble in a mingling of fugue and canon. While the grass bends its head to watch.

I rested against the trunk of a tree, what the peach tree might be if she bloomed forever, both blossoms and fruit, so that she was never bare of either, and her limbs hung down not in submission, but with this richness, this fragrance, this offering, this fusion of two cycles into one eternal abundance. Above, amid fluttering petals, the supply of which seemed inexhaustible and never alarming, I saw the fleeting movement of tiny birds. And beyond that, angels, and angels, and angels, as if they were made of air, the light luminous glittering spirits so faint as to vanish at times in one brilliant breath of the sky.

The Paradise of murals; the Paradise of mosaics. Only no form of art can touch this. Question those who have come and gone. Those whose hearts have stopped on an operating table, so that their souls flew to this garden, and then were brought back down into articulate flesh. Nothing can touch it.

The cool, sweet air surrounded me, slowly removing, layer by layer, the soot and filth that clung to my coat and my shirt.

Suddenly, as if waking to life again from nightmare, I reached inside my shirt and drew out the veil. I unfolded it and held it by its two edges.

The face burned in it, the dark eyes staring at me, the blood as brilliantly red as before, the skin the perfect hue, the depth almost holographic, though the whole expression moved very faintly as the veil moved on the breeze. Nothing had been smeared, torn, or lost.

I felt myself gasp, and my heart speeded dangerously. The heat flooded to my own face.

The brown eyes were steady in their gaze as they had been at that moment, not closing for the soft finely woven fabric. I drew the whole veil close to me, then folded it up again, almost in a panic, and shoved it tight against my skin this time, inside my shirt. I struggled to restore all the buttons to their proper holes. My shirt was all right.  My coat was filthy though intact, but all its buttons were gone, even the buttons that had graced the sleeves and had been no longer of any use and were merely decorative. I looked down at my shoes; they were broken and tattered and barely held together anymore. How strange they looked, how unlike anything I had seen of late, made as they were of such fancy leather.

Petals fell in my hair. I reached up and brushed loose a small shower of them, pink and white, as they fell on my pants and shoes.

"Memnoch!" I said suddenly. I looked around me. Where was he? Was I here alone? Far, far away moved the procession of happy souls across the bridge. Did the gates open and close or was that an illusion?

I looked to the left, to a copse of olive trees, and saw standing beneath it first a figure I didn't recognize, and then realized it was Memnoch as the Ordinary Man. He stood collected, looking at me, face grim and set; then the image began to grow and spread, to sprout its huge black wings, and twisted goat legs, and cloven feet, and the angel face gleamed as if in living black granite. Memnoch, my Memnoch, the Memnoch I knew once again clothed as the demon.

I made no resistance. I didn't cover my face. I studied the details of his robed torso, the way the cloth came down over the hideous fur-covered legs. The cloven feet dug into the ground beneath him, but his hands and arms were his own beautiful hands and arms. His hair was the flowing mane, only jet black. And in all the Garden he was the only pure absence of color, opaque, or at least visible to me, seemingly solid.

"The argument is simple," he said. "Do you have any trouble now understanding it?"

His black wings came in close, hugging the body, lower tips curved forward, near his feet, so that they did not scrape the ground.

He walked towards me, a horrid animalian advance carrying the overwhelmingly perfect torso and head, a hobbled being, thrust into a human conception of evil.

"Right you are," he said, and slowly, almost painfully, seated himself, the wings once more fading because they could never have allowed it; and there he sat, the goat god glaring at me, hair tangled, but face as serene as always, no harsher, no sweeter, no wiser or more cruel, because it was graven out of blackness instead of the shimmering image of flesh.

He began to talk:

"You see, what He actually did was this. He said over and over to me, 'Memnoch, everything in the universe is used ... made use of...  you understand?' And He came down, suffered, died, and rose from the Dead to consecrate human suffering, to enshrine it as a means to an end; the end was illumination, superiority of the soul.

"But the myth of the suffering and Dying God¡ªwhether we speak of Tammuz of Sumer or Dionysus of Greece, or any other deity the world over, whose death and dismemberment preceded Creation¡ªthis was a Human idea! An idea conceived by Humans who could not imagine a Creation from nothing, one which did not involve a sacrifice. The Dying God who gives birth to Man was a young idea in the minds of those too primitive to conceive of anything absolute and perfect. So He grafted himself¡ªGod Incarnate¡ªupon human myths that try to explain things as if they had meaning, when perhaps they don't."

"Yes."

"Where was His sacrifice in making the world?" Memnoch asked.

"He was not Tiamat slain by Marduk. He is not Osiris chopped into pieces! What did He, Almighty God, give up to make the material universe? I do not remember seeing anything taken from Him. That it came out of Him, this is true, but I do not remember Him being lessened, or decimated, or maimed, or decreased by the act of Physical Creation! He was after the Creation of the planets and the stars, the same God! If anything He was increased, or seemed to be in the eyes of His angels, as they sang of new and varying aspects of His Creation. His very nature as Creator grew and expanded in our perceptions, as evolution took His path.

"But when He came as God Incarnate, He imitated myths that men had made to try to sanctify all suffering, to try to say that history is not horror, but has meaning. He plunged down into man-made religion and brought His Divine Grace to those images, and He sanctified suffering by His death, whereas it had not been sanctified in His Creation, you understand?"

"It was a bloodless Creation and without sacrifice," I said. My voice was dull but my mind had never been more alert. "That is what you're saying. But He does believe suffering is sacrosanct or can be.  Nothing is wasted. All things are used."

"Yes. But my position is that He took the awful flaw in His cosmos¡ªhuman pain, misery, the capacity to suffer unspeakable injustice¡ªand He found a place for it, using the worst superstitious beliefs of Men."

"But when people die¡ªwhat happens? Do His believers find the tunnel and the Light and Loved ones?"

"In the places where they have lived in peace and prosperity, generally, yes. They rise without hate or resentment directly into Heaven. And so do some who have no belief in Him whatsoever or His teachings.

"Because they too are Illuminated."

"Yes. And this gratifies Him and expands His Heaven, and Heaven is ever enhanced and enriched by these new souls from all quarters of the world."

"But Hell is also full of souls."

"Hell so far exceeds the size of Heaven as to be laughable. Where on the planet has He ruled where there has not been self-sacrifice, injustice, persecution, torment, war! Every day my confused and embittered pupils are increased in number. There are times of such privation and horror that few souls ascend to Him in peace at all."

"And He does not care."

"Precisely. He says that suffering of sentient beings is like decay; it fertilizes the growth of their souls! He looks from His lofty height upon a massacre and He sees magnificence. He sees men and women never loving so much as when they lose their loved ones, never loving so much as when they sacrifice for others for some abstract notion of Him, never loving so much as when the conquering army comes down to lay waste the hearth, divide the flock, and catch up the bodies of infants on their spears.

"His justification? It's in Nature. It's what He created. And if battered and embittered souls must fall into my hands first and suffer my tutelage in Hell, so much the greater will they become!"

"And your job grows heavier all the time."

"Yes and no. I am winning. But I have to win on His terms. Hell is a place of suffering. But let's go over it carefully. Look at it; what He did:

"When He threw open the gates of Sheol, when He went down into the gloom of Sheol, like the god Tammuz into the Sumerian hell, the souls flocked to Him and saw His redemption and saw the wounds in His Hands and Feet, and that He should die for them gave a focus to their confusion, and of course they flooded with Him into the Gates of Heaven¡ªfor everything they had suffered seemed suddenly to have a meaning.

"But did it have a meaning? Can you give a sacred meaning to the cycle of Nature simply by immersing your Divine Self in it? Is that enough?

"What about the souls who shrink in bitterness, who never flower as the heels of warriors walk over them, what about the souls warped and twisted by unspeakable injustice, who go into eternity cursing, what about a whole modern world which is personally angry with God, angry enough to curse Jesus Christ and God Himself as Luther did, as Dora did, as you have done, as all have done.

"People in your modern world of the late twentieth century have never stopped believing in Him. It's that they hate Him; they resent Him; they are furious with Him. They feel...they feel...."

"Superior to Him," I said quietly, keenly aware that he was saying now some of the very words I myself had said to Dora. We hate God.  We hate Him.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, you feel superior to Him."

' 'And you feel superior."

"Yes. I can't show them His wounds in Hell. That isn't going to win them over, these victims, these grieving, furious sufferers of pain beyond His imagining. I can just tell them that it was the Dominican Fathers in His Name who burnt their bodies alive, thinking them witches. Or that when their families and clans and villages were annihilated by Spanish soldiers, it was all right because His bleeding Hands and Feet were on the banner which the men carried to the New World. You think that would get somebody out of Hell, finding out that He let it happen? And lets other souls ascend without suffering one drop of pain?

"If I were to begin their education with that image¡ªChrist has Died for You¡ªhow long do you think the Hellish education of a soul would take?"

"You haven't told me what Hell is or how you do teach there."

"I run it my way, of that I can assure you.

"I have put my throne above His throne¡ªas the poets and the redactors of Scripture say it¡ªbecause I know that for souls to attain Heaven, suffering was never necessary, that full understanding and receptivity to God never required a fast, a scourging, a crucifixion, a death. I know that the human soul transcended Nature, and needed no more than an eye for beauty to do this! Job was Job before he suffered! Just as after! What did the suffering teach Job that he didn't know before?"

"But how do you make up for it in Hell?"

"I don't begin by telling them that for Him, the human eye expresses the perfection of creation when it looks with horror upon a maimed body, just as it expresses the perfection of Creation when it looks in peace upon a garden.

"And He persists that it's all there. Your Savage Garden, Lestat, is His version of Perfection. It all evolved from the same seed, and I, Memnoch, the Devil, fail to see it. I have an angel's simple mind."

"How do you fight Him in Hell and still win Heaven for the damned, then? How?"

"What do you think Hell is?" he asked. "You must have a surmise by now."

"First of all, it is what we call purgatory," I said. "No one is beyond redemption. I understood from your argument on the battlefield. So what must the souls of Hell suffer to be fully qualified for Heaven?"

"What do you think they should suffer?"

"I don't know. I'm frightened. We're about to go there, aren't we?"

"Yes, but I'd like to know what you expect."

"I don't know what to expect. I know that creatures who have robbed others of life¡ªas I have¡ªshould suffer for it."

"Suffer or pay for it?"

"What would be the difference?"

"Well, suppose you had a chance to forgive Magnus, the vampire who brought you into this, suppose he stood before you and said, 'Lestat, forgive me for taking you out of your mortal life and putting you outside Nature, and making you drink blood to live. Do with me what you will so that you can forgive me.' What would you do?"

"You chose a bad example," I said. "I don't know that I haven't forgiven him. I don't think he knew what he was doing. I don't care about him. He was mad. He was an Old World monster. He started me on the Devil's Road on some warped, impersonal impulse. I don't even think about him. I don't care about him. If he has to seek forgiveness from someone, then let it be from the mortals he killed when he was in existence.

"In his tower was a dungeon filled with slain mortal men¡ªyoung men who resembled me, men he'd brought there to test, apparently, and then killed rather than initiated. I remember them still. But it's just one form of massacre¡ªheaps of bodies of young men, all with blond hair and blue eyes. Young beings robbed of potential and of life itself. His forgiveness would have to come from all those whom he robbed of life in any fashion¡ªhe would have to gain the forgiveness of each one."

I was beginning to tremble again. My anger was so familiar to me.  And how angry I had become many a time when others had accused me of my various flamboyant attacks upon mortal men and women.  And children. Helpless children.

"And you?" he said to me. "For you to get into Heaven, what do you think would be necessary?"

"Well, apparently working for you will do it," I said defiantly. "At least I think it would from what you've said to me. But you haven't really told me precisely what you do! You've told me the story of Creation and the Passion, of Your Way and His Way, you've described how you oppose Him on Earth, and I can imagine the ramifications of that opposition¡ªwe are both sensualists, we are both believers in the wisdom of the flesh."

"Amen to that."

"But you have not gotten to a full explanation of what you do in Hell. And how can you be winning? Are you sending them speedily to His arms?"

"Speedily and with powerful acceptance," he said. "But I am not speaking to you now about my offer to you, or my Earthly opposition to Him; I'm asking you this: Given all that you have seen¡ªWhat do you think Hell should be!"

"I'm afraid to answer. Because I belong there."

"You're never really that afraid of anything. Go on. Make a statement. What do you think Hell ought to be, what should a soul have to endure to be worthy of Heaven? Is it enough to say 'I believe in God'; Jesus, 'I believe in Your Suffering'? Is it enough to say, 'I'm sorry for all my sins because they offend thee, my God?' Or to say, 'I'm sorry because when I was on Earth, I really didn't believe in You and now I know it's true, and wham, bang, one look at this infernal place, and I'm ready! I wouldn't do anything the same way, and please let me into Heaven quick.' "

I didn't answer.

"Should everyone just go to Heaven?" he asked. "I mean, should everyone go?"

"No. That can't be," I said. "Not creatures like me, not creatures who have tortured and killed other creatures, not people who have deliberately duplicated through their actions punishments as severe as disease, or fire, or earthquake¡ªthat is, not people who have done wrongs that hurt others just as much or worse than natural disasters.

It can't be right for them to go to Heaven, not if they don't know, not if they don't understand, not if they haven't begun to comprehend what they've done! Heaven would be Hell in no time if every cruel, selfish, vicious soul went to Heaven. I don't want to meet the unreformed monsters of Earth in Heaven! If it's that easy, then the suffering of this world is damned near.. .."

"Damn near what?

"Unforgivable," I whispered.

"What would be forgivable¡ªfrom the point of view of a soul who died in pain and confusion? A soul who knew that God didn't care?"

"I don't know," I said. "When you described the elect of Sheol, the first million souls you took through the Heavenly Gates, you didn't speak of reformed monsters; you spoke of people who had forgiven God for an unjust world, didn't you?"

"That's right, I did. That's what I found. That's what I took with me with certainty to Heaven's Gates, yes."

"But you spoke entirely as if these people had been victims of God's injustice. You didn't touch upon the souls of the guilty? Those like me¡ªthe transgressors, those who were the doers of injustice?" "Don't you think they have their story?"

"Some may have their excuses, engrained in their stupidity and their simplicity and their fear of authority. I don't know. But many, many evildoers must be just like me. They know how bad they are.  They don't care. They do what they do because ... because they love it. I love making vampires. I love drinking blood. I love taking life. I always have."

"Is that really why you drink blood? Just because you love it? Or isn't it because you were made into a perfect preternatural mechanism for craving blood eternally, and thriving only on blood¡ªsnatched out of life and made a gleaming Child of the Night by an unjust world that cared no more for you and your destiny than it cared for any infant who starved that night in Paris?"

"I don't justify what I do or what I am. If you think I do, if that's why you want me to run Hell with you, or accuse God ...then you picked the wrong person. I deserve to pay for what I've taken from people. Where are their souls, those I've slain? Were they ready for Heaven? Have they gone to Hell? Did those souls loosen in their identity and are they still in the whirlwind between Hell and Heaven?  Souls are there, I know, I saw them, souls who have yet to find either place."

"Yes, true."

"I could have sent souls into the whirlwind. I am the embodiment of greed and cruelty. I devoured the mortals I've killed like so much food and drink. I cannot justify it."

"Do you think I want you to justify it?" Memnoch asked. "What violence have I justified so far? What makes you think I would like you if you justified or defended your actions? Have I ever defended anyone who made anyone else suffer?"

"No, you haven't."

"Well, then?"

"What is Hell, and how can you run it? You don't want people to suffer. You don't even seem to want me to suffer. You can't point to God and say He makes it all Good and Meaningful! You can't. You're His opposition. So what is Hell?"

"What do you think it is?" he asked me again. "What would you morally settle for ... before rejecting me out of hand! Before fleeing from me. What sort of Hell could you believe in and would you¡ªif you were in my place¡ªcreate?"

"A place where people realize what they've done to others; where they face every detail of it, and realize every particle of it, so that they would never, never do the same thing again; a place where souls are reformed, literally, by knowledge of what they'd done wrong and how they could have avoided it, and what they should have done.

When they understand, as you said of the Elect of Sheol, when they can forgive not only God for this big mess, but themselves for their own failures, their own horrible angry reactions, their own spite and meanness, when they love everyone totally in complete forgiveness, then they would be worthy of Heaven. Hell would have to be where they see the consequences of their actions, but with a full merciful comprehension of how little they themselves knew."

"Precisely. To know what has hurt others, to realize that you didn't know, that nobody gave you the knowledge, yet still you had the power! And to forgive that, and forgive your victims, and forgive God and forgive yourself."

"Yes. That would be it. That would terminate my anger, my outrage. I couldn't shake my fist anymore, if only I could forgive God and others and myself."

He didn't say anything. He sat with his arms folded, eyes wide, his dark smooth brow barely touched with the moisture of the air.

"That's what it is, isn't it?" I asked fearfully. "It's ...it's a place where you learn to understand what you've done to another being...  where you come to realize the suffering you've inflicted on others!"

"Yes, and it is terrible. I created it and I run it to make whole again the souls of the just and the unjust, those who had suffered and those who had done cruelty. And the only lesson of that Hell is Love."

I was frightened, as frightened as I had been when we went into Jerusalem.

"He loves my souls when they come to Him," said Memnoch.

"And He sees each one as a justification of His Way!"

I smiled bitterly.

"War is magnificent to Him, and disease is like the color purple in His eyes, and self-sacrifice seems to Him a personal magnification of His Glory! As if He's ever done it! He tries to overwhelm me with numbers. In the name of the cross, more injustice has been perpetrated than for any other single cause or emblem or philosophy or creed on Earth.

"And I empty Hell so fast, soul by soul, by speaking truth about what humans suffer and humans know and what humans can do that my souls go flooding through His gates.

"And who do you think comes into Hell feeling most cheated?  Most angry and unforgiving? The child who died in a gas chamber in an extermination camp? Or a warrior with blood up to his elbows who was told that if he exterminated the enemies of the state he would find his place in Valhalla, Paradise, or Heaven?"

I didn't answer. I was quiet, listening to him, watching him.

He sat forward, commanding my attention even more deliberately, and as he did he changed, changed before my eyes from the Devil, goat-legged, cloven-hoofed beast-man, to the angel, Memnoch, Memnoch in his loose and unimportant robe, his fair eyes beaming at me beneath his golden scowling brows.

"Hell is where I straighten things out that He has made wrong," he said. "Hell is where I reintroduce a frame of mind that might have existed had suffering never destroyed it! Hell is where I teach men and women that they can be better than He is.

"But that's my punishment, Hell¡ªfor arguing with Him, that I must go there and help the souls to fulfill their cycle as He sees it, that I must live there with them! And that if I don't help them, if I don't school them, they may be there forever!

"But Hell is not my battlefield.

"The earth is my battlefield. Lestat, I fight Him not in Hell but on Earth. I roam the world seeking to tear down every edifice He has erected to sanctify self-sacrifice and suffering, to sanctify aggression and cruelty and destruction. I lead men and women from churches and temples to dance, to sing, to drink, to embrace one another with license and love. I do everything I can to show up the lie at the heart of His religions! I try to destroy the lies He's allowed to grow as the Universe Unfolds Itself.

"He is the only one who can enjoy suffering with impunity! And that's because He's God and He doesn't know what it means and He never has known. He's created beings more conscientious and loving than Himself. And the final victory over all human evil will come only when He is dethroned, once and for all, demystified, ignored, repudiated, thrown aside, and men and women seek for the good and the just and the ethical and the loving in each other and for all."

"They're trying to do that, Memnoch! They are!" I said. "That's what they mean when they say they hate Him. That's what Dora meant when she said 'Ask Him why He allows all this!' When she made her hands into fists!"

"I know. Now, do you want to help me fight Him and his Cross or not?

"Will you go with me from Earth to Heaven to that filthy Hell of painful recognition, filthy with its obsession with His suffering! You will not serve me in one place or the other or the other. But in all three. And like me, you may soon come to find Heaven just about as unbearable in its pitch as Hell. Its bliss will make you eager to heal the evil He has done, you will seek Hell to work on those tortured confused souls, to help them up from the morass and into the Light.  When you're in the Light you can't forget them! That's what it means to serve me."

He paused, then he asked:

"Do you have the courage to see it?"

"I want to see it."

"I warn you, it's Hell."

"I am just beginning to imagine. ..."

"It won't exist forever. The day will come when either the world itself is blown to pieces by His human worshippers or when all who die are Illuminated and surrender to Him, and go straight into His arms.

"A perfect world, or a world destroyed, one or the other¡ªsomeday will come the end of Hell. And then I shall go back to Heaven, content to stay there for the first moment of my existence, since the beginning of Time."

"Take me with you into Hell, please. I want to see it now."

He reached out and stroked my hair, put his two hands on the sides of my face. They felt evenly warm and caressing. A sense of tranquility came over me.

"So many times in the past," he said, "I almost had your soul! I saw it almost spring loose from your body, and then the strong preternatural flesh, the preternatural brain, the hero's courage, would hold together the entire monster and the soul would flicker and blaze inside, beyond my grasp. And now, now I risk plunging you into it before you need to go, plunging you into it when you can choose to go or come, in the hope that you can endure what you see and hear and return and be with me and help me."

"Was there ever a time when my soul would have soared to Heaven, past you, past the whirlwind?"

"What do you think?"

"I remember ...once, when I was alive. ..."

"Yes?"

"A golden moment, when I was drinking and talking with my good friend, Nicolas, and we were in an inn together in my village in France. And there came this golden moment when everything seemed tolerable and independently beautiful of any horror that could be or ever had been done. Just a moment, a drunken moment. I described it once in writing; I tried to reinvoke it. It was a moment in which I could have forgiven anything, and given anything, and perhaps when I didn't even exist: when all I saw was beyond me, outside me. I don't know. Maybe if death had come at that very moment¡ª"

"But fear came, fear when you realized that even if you died you might not understand anything, that there might be nothing...."

"...yes. And now I fear something worse. That there is something, certainly, and it may be worse than nothing at all."

"You're right to think so. It doesn't take much of a thumbscrew or the nails or the fire to make men and women wish for oblivion. Not much at all. Imagine, to wish that you had never lived."

"I know the concept. I fear knowing the feeling again."

"You're wise to fear, but you've never been more ready for what I have to reveal."