Judgement

GEORGE GALLOWAY: You're not my judge, you're not fit to be my judge...

JO COBURN: Well thank you very much...

BBC, 2016







Content Warning:
Brief violence references, humour of a religious nature which some may find offensive

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Judgment

            Betrayal is what they cried, it was the damning, grand, and anguished amphibrach they took it upon themselves to throw at me in accusation. They came to my room as a pack, wildly and animally irate with what censure they felt quite justified in visiting upon me in my role as chief editor of Papercut. I considered myself to have once been one of them; they did too, and so they detested my departure, in spirit if not in actuality. But I was surprised to discover that punctation, more even than inclination or persuasion, the form not the substance, was the thing that had angered them most of all.

            Listening in at the grapevine, years after, I have become aware that Papercut no longer exists. At the time, the time when Papercut was, it was more or less solely dedicated to the contemporary art community in the capital. It told of exhibitions, shows, instatements; occasionally of performance art, though at the time of my tenure the zeitgeist had long moved on from live performance art. Paintings, framed images wrought in whatever substance, sculptures, installations, beautifully photographed and explicated, filled the glossy pages. Testimonials, reviews, responses, interviews. Occasionally, a witnessed piece would seize upon the mind or soul of one of the staff writers, and a two-page spread, discursive and laudatory, would materialise and find its way into the publication. An enormous transparent vat of urines at The Pegasus did once provoke such a reaction in one who would take on the role of one of my destroyers. SpissThousand was the urine of six thousand male, female, and juvenile volunteers, all combined. It was dedicated to the memory of six thousand dead, the casualty-count of some massacre or other, I have long forgotten which, where and by whom it was perpetrated. Walking around the giant vat, observing the carefully lit pooling of odd, oily greens, lemongrass yellows, languorous pales, she later narrated how she could hardly explain or account for the fever that took possession of her hand, that set her furiously jotting, scribbling in her notepad. She wrote and rewrote her spread in one evening. It was on my desk by nine o’clock the following morning. It was wonderful, vivid, passionate, rich in enquiry and curiosity, and I told her as much. I thanked her for what she had written. I edited her writing, I reworded that which was tortuously expressed, I tied a few loose ends syntactically (occasionally grammatically) speaking, even snipped off with the greatest permanency that which was tangential, irrelevant, or tautologous. I showed her the final draft, and she agreed, or came to agree after half a minute’s debate, with all my editorial decisions. Apart from one.

            Three adjectives, an adjectival tricolon, will often constitute an effective title in our world. A subtitle beneath can helpfully contextualise the three adjectives. The first two are separated by a comma, the final two by a syndetic and conclusive: “And”. The piece this colleague of mine had written had been called, or perhaps just quite naturally decided to call itself “Luminous, Poignant and Audacious”. I suggested a comma before “and”. Luminous, Poignant, and Audacious”. I surmised that it looked better, seemed more correct to me. It took me with great surprise how viscerally she reacted, she even fabricated the existence of a Papercut policy regarding the so-called Oxford Comma, to which her recourse was fervent, suggesting that the Oxford Comma could not be used as it smacked of classism, elitism, and perhaps any number of other Isms yet to be named and connected with the Oxford Comma’s curious violence, maybe even a few Rys, as in Snobbery. I hastened to make it known to her that I was unaware of the existence of such a policy, and that I disagreed with its presuppositions. She then started using the noun “policy”, occasionally the noun “rule”, both in close proximity to the adjective “unwritten”. The situation had unfolded before me swiftly and clearly. I had other editorial matters to attend to, so I put an end to the conversation, placating her with the assurance that I would heed her reservations, so strongly and loudly had they been voiced.

            With the printed final-draft, I retreated to my office, the Oxford Comma intact in the title. I didn’t quite realise it until I sat down at my desk, but the disagreement had provoked awake something that had long lived (and slept) within me, it had awakened some curious, defending, inner inquisition. Something to do with taste, and opinion, and audience, and sophistication, and ignorance. Concerns with which the artworld rubs and jostles shoulders I might add. Memories stirred in me too, fair multitudes. The tyranny of the blackboard, all those markings etched scratchily into being upon it by my overseers, clerical disciplinarians, suited in three-piece suits. I considered my upbringing. I was actively seeking something, I hungrily gobbled the figurative, summoning madeleine: the Oxford Comma was a kind of fishing line, or net, to the fish of my memories. I never fished, with nets, line, bait. I did, however, receive a butterfly net when I was very small. I brandished it in tall grasses, occasionally I put it to use in the air, chasing a brimstone, or an orange tip. Mostly I swiped it through the grasses and reeds and I would unfold it and take great pleasure in discovering what had been captured in the cotton compass of the bag. Invariably nothing. The finishing line is the apter metaphor. I cast my line, and I waited with the rod tightly, expectantly grasped between my hands. The Oxford Comma was this fishing line, I was waiting for memory-fish to attach themselves to it. Various volumes, redolent with must, yellow with age. There was something begging to be remembered…I couldn’t see the cover of the book in my mind’s eye and my memory couldn’t remember it. It was a small children’s book. That was when I had first heard it named, my mother named it aloud, pointing to it: The Oxford Comma. A Mr. Man book! That was it. Of all works of literature, the Mr. Man series is perhaps the most adjectivally minded. The Seven Dwarves are fond relatives of the Mr. Men, they visit for barbecues, they all enjoy nights on the town together. It was later explained again, at the blackboard, when I was several years older, the purpose, history, efficacy, the possibility, the permissibility of the Oxford Comma. The final fish of memory I caught on my Oxford Comma line, the biggest though not the tastiest of the three, was outrage, made public, that a Tory politician had stipulated that his administrative staff use the Oxford Comma in all documents, written exchanges, memos.

            I didn’t know why this small, insignificant, somewhat antique element of grammar, should call to me with such power, why it should obsess me to this unnerving extent. What reason did it have for making itself so starkly visible to me? I had never cared either way, before. Successive adjectives had certainly suggested themselves as titles before…I delved into my lowest desk drawer and elicited a stack of issues. I leafed through the first issue, several months old, that sat top of the pile, a pile forged not by chronology, nor systematisation of any kind. I lit upon a review for a Mr. Harvey Flume’s exhibition Wasps. The title ran: “Repetitive, Ugly and Pointless”. Mr. Flume had painted, photographed, sometimes imposed photographs over paintings, sometimes painted over photographs of wasps. Wasps from every angle, wasps alone and wasps in groups, wasps alighted and wasps in flight, wasps alive and wasps deceased. Multiple species. Not only the usual, mean-faced, lethal, striped imposters to gardens and outside seating areas, but Ichneumons, parasitoids, and gall wasps. The exhibition had stayed with me, I hadn’t reviewed it but I had walked through its waspish halls with great curiosity and found myself drawn to something in the images, in the black, empty eyes, the stained-glass wings, the intent, bullying legs, the tigered bodies at the back-tip of which trembled that infamous set of stings. The artist was fairly ambiguous in his survey of wasps, his eye looked and saw a great deal, his heart remained unmoved, his soul did not seem sing, but he ostensibly felt no fear of them, no disgust. I read…there is a lazy arrogance to PENT graduate Harvey Flume’s latest AF Academy exhibition. The larvae of this almost universally despised winged insect hold no appeal for Mr. Flume. He begins strongly, showing us in initial displays, a variety of gardens in unweeded disarray…the gardens become gradually tidier, less wild, more kempt. With pitchers of juice come the vexatious visitors that form the principal focus of the exhibition…the abdication of political responsibility is mind-boggling. His eye extracts nothing from the diabolical figure of the wasp, he shows nothing worthy of awe in the wasps’ fearsome outwardness, he discovers no tenderness in their hostility, nor does he find anything worthwhile to say about bourgeois exploitation, mankind’s abuse of nature, addiction to sweet things, parasitic invasion… I stopped reading. “Repetitive, Ugly and Pointless”. No Oxford Comma. I recalled liking the exhibition, it had followed me out into the blue, urban night. Wasps hummed in my imagination, I glanced about me to make sure there were none pursuing me. I felt that Wasps wasn’t really about wasps at all: I felt it was about people. That old chestnut.

            At any rate, I felt very strongly that a comma was called for between the second and third adjective of Tanya’s “Luminous, Poignant, and Audacious”, concerning the vat of urines. It called to me, it was out of my hands, the idea insisted itself, asserted itself. Indeed I took the Oxford Comma to be a comforting thing. I had no fear of the backlash, the outrage it would cause. More than that, it seemed to me a saving remnant, a calm, serious, learned nugget of wisdom in a strange, myopic age. I decided to print it, in the title of Tanya’s two-page spread. Further to that, I would make it the centrepiece of the issue. I made the executive decision that that Oxford Comma would headline the front-page of that’s weeks Papercut. “Luminous, Poignant, and Audacious”. Indeed, the last of the three aptly selected adjectives had become for me a belated source of inspiration. I felt audacity itself. I made all these stipulations, and sent the edited verbiage, to the artwork team. When text and artwork were assembled I would oversee its final preview, immediately prior to print, and publication to the paid digital platform. 

Within an hour, it was prepared. So, on the front page and on the spread within containing Tanya’s appraisal, were laid out the photographer’s photographs of the urine exhibit from all sides, the ambrosial vat glimmering, the substance within the glass lit beautifully by the expert overhead lighting. Beneath the usual brand name Papercut, was, printed in bold white lettering, in our usual font: “Luminous, Poignant, and Audacious”, Oxford Comma before the “and” and then directly below: so and so’s new exhibit, read all about it on page such and such. Perfect! On the evening of distribution, I took the issue affectionately in my hands, while its glossy leaves gleamed and it was still hot, hot off the proverbial press, that final fruit on the other side of the machine’s cacophonous, mechanical, auto-erotic love-making: and I felt quite content.

            Back at my apartment, leaving the door unbolted behind me as was my wont, I drank a few beers in celebration, one or two artfully swirled brandies as well, and slept. I slept, that night, with the latest issue of Papercut, a small, square, papery lover, lodged in the crook of my right arm. 

            I woke at a small, ungodly hour. Before I could become aware of the time, the soft slap of a new hour in the panels of the old, numerical alarm clock on the dresser beside me, I eyed with a suspicion quite new to me, the moving, windblown shadows of the trees. It was an unbeautiful night, the shadows as unbeautiful, their curling points, their sways and sibilant innuendi, ugly. Ugly. I heard footsteps, a floor away. I heard a clatter, something like a roughly handled saucepan. The steps seemed to walk closer to my room. I feared them. I wished for them to pass my door, pass on their way to somewhere else. I didn’t recognise those footsteps. I remembered quite suddenly the unlocked door. Before I even knew why, my breath held itself in apprehension: it was something to do with the nocturnal noises, coming closer, in the corridor, but that unlocked door was the thing that struck fear into the whole of me. A memory moved, and raised its voice. Tanya. When we were together for that tepid three months last year, tepid for the most part, quite icy in the last days, she always used to admonish me for forgetting to lock my apartment door.

            They entered before I could rectify the issue, but judging from their sinister toolkit, heavy-set with a miscellany of implements, for entry not for torture I glean, since they killed me with the greatest alacrity, the locked door would have been no obstacle to their assaults. They all laboured as a team to surround me, barricade me, recite their manifesto at me, and then took it in turns to stab me in various vulnerable regions of my body, which they had relieved of all pyjamas. Tanya was among their number. She was non-committal initially, but gradually made discovery of an intense eagerness, stabbing me, stab-stab-stabbing me with a kitchen knife in the guts until she was weeping and had to be restrained, weeping with hysteria, regret, or pleasure I could not tell, but  I was able to observe an aqueous, red puddle of her ducts’ bountiful tears and my own arterial blood commingle on my floor, which was, serendipitously, uncarpeted.

            I was a disreputable sight, my corpse sat awkward, stiff, silent, dead-eyed, withdrawn beyond all summoning, weeping with wounds, in my one apartment chair. But I wouldn’t have chosen to be my treacherous colleagues over my martyred self, the lot of them white as sheets, off their faces as the Manson members who crossed the threshold of the Polanski residence, as worked up with misplaced zest and adolescent fervency. They all went, Tanya and the stupid rest of them, whooping and crying and leaping, leaving me to my own useless devices. All because of a bloody Oxford Comma.

            I never knew such silence, such stillness, such peace. Finally, I was safe from danger, locked away from the world, unable to answer the door should the odd widow in J28 knock knock knock, unable to leaf through the Papercut spreadeagled on the floor. Morning came and the two masked men came. They called themselves The Delivery Men. They reached into my brain and pulled something out, putting it in a small glass case, like a square goldfish bowl, lidded. I found that I was that something, all of me was able to think, live, breathe like thought itself breathes, from within that small, dislodged, glowing ingot of me, leaving my body behind, which was beginning to rot and reek. I found that I was able to speak. I spoke to them.

            “Hello,” I said. No response. “Where are you taking me?”

            “We’re The Delivery Men,” the one I took to be the superior said, his subordinate the one to walk with me in his arms. 

            “Do you work for Deliveroo?” I asked. “I do enjoy having a chow mein delivered to me of an evening…”

            “We’re taking you to the Beer Garden,” the superior said, interrupting me. It was the last thing that he said.

            They couriered me in darkness to The Beer Garden. Having disembarked their vehicle, I was able to observe that, though it called itself a pub, the building was a faceless, uninviting, chilling mound of brick and metal, cold, sober, and official. I was carried down a corridor, passing strange rooms peopled with various languid, sprawling, occasionally hanging inhabitants, whose strange positions and postures I could only fleetingly identify. At the end of that long, long corridor, the journey down which had seemed to me interminable- a small lifetime- we emerged into natural light, trees that entertained the wind, a ruffling guest, rustling with him softly. A beautiful eastern beam of morning touched me. The place was like a pub garden, there was even a little slide for the kids to play on, wherever they had gone. I heard the sound of children’s laughter, but I couldn’t see any children. The emergence and disappearance of the curious, ambient laughter boomed and resonated as if the laugher was underground, in tubular metal. It took on an ominous quality. The benches were pleasant, all on a little bit of a slope but perfectly habitable, and parasols were erected in the centre of each one. The birds in the trees that whistled and bickered full of the morning, sounded like normal birds, but the patterns of cosos and beeps and trills did seem somehow altered, somehow different from the songs I was used to hearing, though I couldn’t really identify with any precision in what way. Strange people sat at the Beer Garden benches, some clustered, some alone, like statues, solidified, as still as if their flesh was of papier mâché, backs turned, not one among their congealed number eating, drinking, smoking, chatting as they might have in life. I wished a particular big fat man with his back to the world might stir from his stasis. But he could not, would not.

            I was set down in my glass case upon the grass. Somewhere far away and far above, I heard the calls of crows, calm in their morbidity.

            “Wait a while,” a voice said. I think it was the subordinate of the two delivery men. They went away. Crow again. 

            A while did pass. Until, from a parting in the surrounding trees, a procession moved towards me. To the coronational anthem “Because” from the album Abbey Road, to its slow, solemn measure, the litter, like a burnished throne, in which He papally sat, was carried towards me on the backs of six enormous ginger highland sheep, between the trottng backlegs of which, in each case, steadily swung a set of massive testicles. Two chimpanzees in surplices, swung censers in symmetrical smoky swings, beside the old, white Godhead topping the procession. He was a round, little dwarf, nude but for a loincloth, and He wheezed and perspired profusely as he dragged upon a cigar that was far too almighty for His weedy respiration.

            The song ended and He was set down before me. There was an eerie quiet. The figures at the tables did not move a muscle, they still did not turn their backs an iota. The procession, now come to rest, all stood before me, the chimpanzees and the sheep and the dwarf all looked at me expectantly, all, with large, lunar eyes.

            “Well?” the dwarf barked, angrily, stabbing out the cigar in an ashtray, reverently raised by one of the chimpanzees to about His right hand.

            “What do you want from me?” I answered. It sounded like my voice couldn’t penetrate the walls of my glass case. But they heard me:

            “State your defence,” the dwarf said.

            “My defence?”

            “Beyond this garden are the gates. You cannot pass the gates without making a defence. Make your defence and I shall judge you, your worthiness, whether you may pass through my gates.”

            I felt unable to say anything. 

“Make your plea and I shall hear it,” the dwarf said.

“Your gates?” I remember questioning. 

            The dwarf’s mood lightened. Levity warmed the cold acrimony and severity with which he had seemed armoured most impregnably. He chuckled: “Oh, I simply adore my gates. Sometimes I wiggle them, waggle them, just for a laugh. Sometimes I open and close them electronically, from the comfort of my living room, it is a tonic ! They were designed by a very great artist, a modernist.” Then he seemed mortified by his flight of enthusiasm. I found it infectious, oddly charming. “But enough of all that, state your case…”

            I pondered my case, my defence. I imagined the gates, a balustrade entrance. A wall of rails, a prison cell door, liberating not entrapping. I imagined passing through them, stepping on cloud streets of peach-pink, barefooted, into paradise. “I don’t know how to begin…”

            “Oh, poo to you,” the dwarf impatiently grumped. “Someone fetch Jesus.”

            My face brightened, my antennae lifted, tingled. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to meet him,” I said. “He’s acclaimed the world over…”

            “Silence!” the dwarf interrupted.

            We waited in the commanded silence.

            “Where is that feckless little toerag!” the dwarf cried.

            One of the sheep said Baa! After a brief moment in which the dwarf’s eyes darkened, His brows knitted, and He looked absolutely furious. Then He broke out into uproarious laughter, saying: “That was a good one, Ignatius! You do have such a surreal sense of humour!”

            Baa, said Ignatius the sheep.

            Tears filled the dwarf’s eyes, they effortfully fought their way out of His sockets, both of which sat folded away with almost manic laughter, and lined His face. He held His sides, He bellowed and hiccupped and bubbled. “Stop it, Ignatius, you’re killing me!”

            Jesus arrived.

            “There he is!” the dwarf roared. “The product of my bollocks”.

            Jesus looked pale, withdrawn, hollow. He was grotesquely overweight, and shuffled to the patch of grass before the dwarf, his bloated, dull face transfixed upon the screen of a device I couldn’t easily identify, which he scrolled through disconsolately, almost mindlessly.

            “My son,” the dwarf said. “Isn’t he cute. Oh, put that calculator away, idiot,” the dwarf snapped at Jesus.

            Jesus bashfully slipped the device away into his back, trouser pocket. His weary eyes looked me up and down with a strange, sad humanity. It was a look shorn of all celestial pallor and coldness, and disdain.

            “Do your stupid dance, then,” the dwarf barked at Jesus.

            Ignatius the sheep went into a patch of trees and thicket, and returned with a CD player. Jesus thanked him for it, and pressed one button, and then another. The second caused an ugly, battered sounding strain to sing out. I recognised it as being The Dubliner’s recording of “Lord of the Dance”. I danced in the morning when the world was young, I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun, I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth…” To the accompaniment of the hymn’s jaunty tempo, I couldn’t help but look in unbearable pity as Jesus inelegantly gyrated and jigged before me. This went on for about another one and a half-verses, at which point he was glistening and panting.

            “Thank you!” the dwarf declaimed, causing proceedings to cease. “That’s quite enough of that. Get off up to your room.”

            Jesus shrugged a little in exasperation, and half rolled his eyes, before trudging back to his room, re-eliciting the device and staring at it blankly as he retired.

            I heard a voice mutter as the baleful, unattractive, and podgy little Jesus shuffled off: when’s that little arse gonna get a job!

            “Well, what have you to say for yourself?” 

            The dwarf was looking right at me, I knew He was talking to me.

            I prepared my answer carefully. “I was murdered for making an editorial decision.” I said.

            The dwarf tutted. “And what decision was that?”

            “I used the Oxford Comma,” I said.

            “Meaning?” the dwarf enquired, without grace or patience.

            “The final “and” in a list of things had a comma before it.”

            “Give me an example.”

            “Um…pears, bananas, and grapes: comma between Pears and Bananas, comma between Bananas and And grapes”.

            The dwarf considered my infraction. Then he guffawed, and laughed wildly.

            “They murdered you for that!” he managed, between chortles, “Oh Me God, that’s hilarious”. 

            I remembered my betrayal, by people whom I considered friends. Though of course, in their mind, I was the betrayer.

            “What was their objection?” the dwarf enquired, having taken the time he desired to regain composure.

            “I think they considered it snobbish, elitist, out of tune with the register and customer preference of the magazine I edit,” I said. Remembering the cold, secular facts of my life, I felt the hot rise of emotion within me.

            “If you understood their objection, why did you not heed it?” the dwarf asked.

            This wasn’t a question that I felt I knew the answer too. 

            “I made a judgement,” I said. “In my judgement, it was right to put it. It felt fitting, it soothed and gratified my inner ear, my eye.” I didn’t feel able to confess that it comforted me, that something to do with home, and safety, and the early discovery of books and the sentences of which they are composed, had led me, at least it part, to print it. Finally, meekly, I added, knowing that there was nothing more to add: “I liked it.”

            The dwarf began to speak: “In your “Judgment” then,” he began, quoting my word and imbuing its trochee with no small dose of ridicule, “…did you lead a decent life?”

            “I was chief editor of Papercut for three years. I achieved new sales, new popularity, I hoisted it up to a new pinnacle, from the depths of degradation. I helped launch the careers of at least ten graduate artists. I tried to be a painter, a photographer, I crossed the dividing rifts between any number of media, my devotion to the humanities, to human creativity has been unswerving for…”

            “Awwwwwwwwoooooor!” an enormous, loud, interposing yawn from the dwarf interrupted my recital. The yawn crucified his arms into a disproportioned V. “Sorry, long day, lots of excitement. I think I get the picture. Men! Where are my men! Men! Take him to the waiting room.”

            I couldn’t see the face of them that carried me. The pace of movement and the approximate height at which I was borne seemed to me the same as before. I took my deliverers to be the Delivery Men. They carried me away from the Beer Garden. In one of the rooms I had passed on the way to the Beer Garden, bare and punitive as a castle keep but for a low, wide coffee table with magazines upon it, I was deposited.

            “This is the waiting room,” a voice I recognised as belonging to the subordinate said. “Help yourself to a broadsheet. Or a humorous gossip magazine”. 

            He left, locking the door behind him. I reached for the table but I had no way of penetrating the glass of my enclosure. I had predicted that this would pose a problem with regards to the reading material. I felt half-amazed that neither the subordinate, nor the superior, of the two Delivery Men, had managed to realise this. I sat, thinking that it was no life being a gallery exhibit, or a museum exhibit. How sorry I felt for the stagnating, artificially preserved and coloured urines in their vat. I began, also, and for the first time since I had parted ways with it, to mourn the loss of my body. I imagined it being found, in its sorry state by swat teams and sniffer dogs; my mother identifying it, weeping over it. I imagined it being stored, freezer-drawered in the mortuary, then uncovered, embalmed by a junior embalmer, the senior embalmer judging his subordinate’s work with keen and careful eye. A moment later, I was startled by a voice:

            “Hello!”

            I looked up and looked about. I half-recognised the man. He was large, fat, hairy, like a gorilla, squat and solid. The majority of him was in black, the upper section short-sleeved, revealing his arms, and unbuttoned to a point about halfway down his chest. He smiled a lot, but his eyes retreated in sadness within their sockets and their adjacent crows-feet, colouring his cheer with melancholy.

            “Hello,” I said.

            The silence was awkward.

            I began: “Their deliberating my…”

            “Yes, me too,” he said, eagerly.

            “You don’t even get given a lawyer,” I said. “And they judge you all the same.” 

            “Yeah,” the man said. “I’ve been judged all my life.”

            “Have you?” I said.

            “Yes, I have,” said the man. 

            “You’re not…” I began, unable to remember the name, but about to identify him by a different reference to who he was, a more meaningful one it could be argued.

            “Yes, I am,” he interjected, correctly guessing what I was about to ask. His name didn’t matter much. I knew who he was. The piece that made him famous was an enormous comma, displayed as if in levitation, ten feet above the ground. I remembered seeing it. I wasn’t much more than a child. In a vast, almost blindingly white room at the Tate Modern, Comma sat. The surrounding white hurt my eyes, so the black bulge of the comma’s head, like a filled in 9, soothed them. How beautiful the sperm-like curve of the tail, the black bulge of the head. A mark, a monument, a symbol. A work of art.

            “Thank you for Comma,” I said. “It changed my life”.

            He smiled and shook his head a little: “I don’t deserve much credit, really,” he said.

            “But you made it,” I said. “It was your idea!” I protested. I flickered.

            “It wasn’t my idea, actually,” he said. “It was meant to be a semi-colon. Before the show opened in New York, someone stole the top of it, the dot. Some gang of hoodlums. But…they gave me a career, I think. I should be thanking them. They left behind a comma. I don’t think people would have responded to a semicolon. Not as they did to a comma.”

            “Why?”

            The man paused a moment. “I think it’s because a comma is a greeting to the new, and a farewell to the old, a standing on the brink between two worlds, two spheres, between two…two anything really.”

            “Amazing what art can do,” I said.

            “Well…” the man answered. “It doesn’t do very much, most of the time.” A hand knocked on the waiting room door, and the door opened. “I think that’s for me,” the man said, in answer. “They’ve arrived at a judgment”.

            “They’re ready for you,” said one of the Delivery Men. The one who had spoken strode over to the man sitting in the waiting room with me, and out of his body emerged a glass cabinet containing his soul, a glowing shard of fire. The soul in the glass case was removed and his body was left behind, a smiling husk, motionless. So that’s how people appear here, I remember thinking. Perhaps he saw me as I was, as I had been. Our souls glimmered and gleamed, each to each. I called out to him as he was taken away, to hear his judgment.

            “How did you die?” I cried.

            As he disappeared down the corridor, back to the green, bright glow of the Beer Garden, he called back:

            “I had an idea. I got killed for it. They slaughtered me.”