RALLY THE DAMNED (a short story)

      Ultimately there were only 180,000 glorified believers inside God's kingdom, most of them politically conservative Fundamentalist Christians of one variety or another.  
      No Jews.  No Catholics.  No liberals or gays.  
      All of them, along with all the other nonbelievers and wrong believers who had the misfortune of being born after the first Christmas, had been funneled into Gehenna, and their blistered flesh glowed like the tips of a trillion cigarettes in the great, black void of eternity.  
      Pope John Paul, Adolf Hitler, Gandhi, Walt Disney, Rock Hudson, Charles Manson, Bertrand Russell, Walt Whitman, John Kennedy -- a fetid, squirming stew simmering in the vast caldron of Hell.  Many had their chance at redemption, but none had taken it -- Jack the Ripper, Geronimo, Emily Dickinson, Clyde Barrow.  
      I was there, too, standing momentarily between Tennessee Williams and Saint John of the Cross, two great writers.  A week before I would have hardly noticed, but eventually one becomes accustomed to the constant pain, the cacophony of moans and screams, and the stench of burning hair and flesh.  
      Jesus!  
      Our trials had been shams in light of what was at stake.  It was true I had done little good of consequence in my lifetime, though I'd been generous enough with money and displayed a sort of inherent humbleness that my psychiatrist attributed to a bad self image.  When you stacked the good things I'd accomplished next to, say, Louis Pasteur's or Albert Schweitzer's contributions, you didn't have a hell of a stack.  On the other hand, I'd seen Louis' goateed mug steaming like a hot pot of lintels only yesterday, the flesh bubbling and popping like molten lead.  
      So, none of it had really done them any good anyway...those good intentions, those mighty deeds, those crazy self-sacrifices made for the sake of humanity.  Hitler, after all, was a trustee--a sort of teacher's pet who would turn up the heat on the whole shebang, burning his own ass to a frazzle but cackling like a laying hen at the sight of a few Jews and Negroes squirming about in the flames.    
      It wasn't good deeds that had done the trick for those feasting at the Eternal Banquet but, as Pat Robertson had continually emphasized back when many of us were blowing our chances at redemption, faith.  Not just any kind of faith, either, but the right kind of faith:  Pat's kind.  
      “There is a man in Memphis with hemorrhoids," Pat used to say.  "You can sit down now.  You have been healed."  
      I had caught a glimpse of Pat, who I had vehemently badmouthed even after I'd given up on Scientology and attended the Recycled Catholic classes at my mother's church, the Cathedral of the Shrine of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.  He was sitting among the spectators at my so-called trial, apparently enjoying the show.  
      Defendants were lined in single file as far as the eye could see.  Most of them were going straight to Hell.  The guy in front of me had been a devout Jehovah's Witness, but all those years of prayer, no music, and little TV hadn't done him any good. He could have indulged in the Playboy Channel -- could have worn his wife's lingerie and made love to his cousin George.  But he had resisted those impulses, all for naught, and then had gone down screaming about the injustice of it all.  
      When it was my turn I said this: "I'm really sorry."  
      Most of us said something like that. Faced with an eternity of torture in the depths of Hell, most of us were really very sorry.  
      A stern looking angel searched the Book of Life for my name.  
      "Let's see. DelPriorie...DelPriorie...here it is!  Lucilla Elizabeth DelPriorie!"  He seemed genuinely happy.  
      "That was my crazy aunt," I told him. "She was a fanatic."  
      "Fanatic indeed," the angel said.  Then, "This one's Hell-bound."  
      And despite my pitiful begging, my threats, my wailing and moaning, I was hustled out of Heaven and shoved into the Pit of Hell.  
   
      "I wouldn't want to be up there with Pat Robertson anyway."  
      It was Aldous Huxley.  As he spoke to me, a flame engulfed his head.  He barely flinched.  
      "Anything is better than this," I said.  
      I was, I swear to God, standing in a bed of white-hot coals that stretched for acres in every direction.  The skin on my feet was running like butter on a hot skillet.  I could see the bones glowing inside like the heating coils of a hot plate.  
      I'd lift one blistered, blackened nub of foot, then the other, like running in place, and I savored the nanosecond during one of my poor feet was off the ground.  It was a macabre dance from which I was exhausted, but, of course, I couldn't stop.  I thought how pleasant it would be to die, but, of course, I couldn't do that either.  
      "Don't fight it," an English accent behind me said.  "Eternity is a long time.  You'll wear yourself out."  
      I looked through the haze of heat and smoke in the direction of the voice.  It was Charlie Chaplain, well-known comedian and sodomite.  There were other famous people standing amid the crowd.  Joseph Stalin.  Abe Lincoln.  Ted Bundy.  John Lennon.  All of us, saints and sinners, were right there, in Hell, together.  
      There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.  
      A rumor had been circulating since I had arrived.  It was started by a tenth century Pope who had been scorched black as a marshmallow at a cookout.  The rumor was that this was not Hell but Purgatory, which meant that after we'd been purged and perfected down here for a few thousand centuries we'd be taken up to Heaven.  That gave us a little hope, which made the unbearable torment almost bearable, which was against the Rules of Hell.  So an angel who resembled Oral Roberts--perhaps his brother, Anal--was dispatched from Heaven to explain to us that there was no such thing as Purgatory.  
      "Read the Book," he said, holding a Bible up.  "If it ain't in the book, it just ain't so."  
      It's all a matter of interpretation, I thought.  It was an automatic response--the kind of thing I always thought when confronted with a narrow, literalist interpretation of what was called God's Word. But the angel must have read my mind.  
      "There ain't no interpretation, there's just the Word," he said as he shoved the Bible in my face.  "This, brother, is the Word of God, and God ain't no liar."  
      Fundamentalists always win in a theological clash.  Nobody wants to call God a liar.  
      The angel was levitating, apparently afraid to get his slippers dirty in the muck and mire of Hell, and he began to float away.  
      "Second Maccabees 12, 43-46," I called after him as he ascended into the smoke.  
      "Ain't no Maccabees in my Bible," he said.  
      He was ascending very quickly now--a glorious, shimmering speck in the smoky darkness above.  
      "It's in the Catholic Bible," I screamed.  
      But he was gone.  
      The whole thing got under what was left of my skin.  I wanted to rally the damned--to march on Heaven the way disgruntled blacks, women, and gays had marched on Washington during my lifetime.  I wanted a fair shake.  I wanted to stand up there surrounded by devout Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and Jews and whatever Baptists I could find and tell the heavenly hosts how we had tried to believe in a just God, a loving God, a God who looked at the hearts of men and saw the best parts, a God of love who embraced humanity with all-powerful arms and lifted and healed each of us, who knew that all of us, in our way, had looked for Him, and that the best of us had really done the best we could under the circumstances our lives presented.  
      But I could already hear the Bible verses being fired like computerized heat-seeking missiles at the dilapidated blimp of my liberal theology -- literalist interpretations that left no room for error or debate as though the Bible had no history, as though it had plopped down in a cellophane wrapper from God's own hands, complete with footnotes and a map of Old Jerusalem.  
      The worst part of it was this: apparently it had.  
      "Never argue with a fundamentalist," I said to myself, and I began dancing across those coals toward a shallow little pool of slimy, jade-colored water. It was just beginning to boil, but I wanted to put my feet in. I had to get some relief.