The next morning, Marty woke up early and stopped by to talk to Peter. It is probably not important, but it is still worth pointing out that there was no night or morning in heaven. Time works much differently there. Time is a human concept, at least in the form of 24 hour days and minutes and seconds. In truth, multiple versions of many events happen simultaneously, while the actual time between seconds on earth can stretch out for eons in heaven, depending on what’s needed. It’s all very confusing, and that’s why when people arrive in the afterlife, things like daytime and nighttime, sleep schedules and other stuff like it are maintained for their benefit. It takes time for the human mind to adjust to the fact that many of the things they took for granted are not even needed anymore.
Sleep was not one of those. Human souls never adapt that much. Even in the afterlife, people slept. The angels quickly learned that not sleeping drove humans crazy. In fact, people got to sleep in hell as well, otherwise they soon deteriorated to the point that eternal suffering was losing a lot of its effectiveness. Granted, they never got a good night’s sleep in hell. Their beds always felt too hard or too soft, it was always just a little too hot or cold, and they felt like they had to pee constantly. In heaven, none of that was a problem. You fell right to sleep and slept soundly in the perfect temperature all night. That alone was reason enough to try to live a good life. Marty often thought that if Jesus had mentioned that little perk, mankind would have been much nicer throughout history.
Angels slept as well. It wasn’t that they needed to do it, it was just that God designed it that way so that they wouldn’t be bored silly or lose their minds. Like humans, they just needed a break. Being forced to be conscious every moment of your life is no good for anyone or anything. It overwhelms you. Only a few angels never slept, and they were the head angels; God’s favorites, and those with a lot of power and decision making clearance, like Peter.
The truth is, heaven or not, Marty didn’t sleep well at all the night before. He dreamt of Carl, and woke up several times, worrying just how he was making out. He finally gave up on sleep and headed over to the front desk.
“Did you see that shitshow yesterday?” He was asking Peter now.
“You know I did,” Peter replied. “It was horrible.”
“And that doesn’t tell you enough? You can’t just send him to hell based on that and get it over with?”
“It doesn’t work that way.” Peter explained. “You know that, yet you keep asking. Just accept your job and get on with it.”
“But it’s pointless!” Marty protested. “He’s irredeemable. He’s not going to learn or change.”
“You better not let Jesus hear you talking like that,” Chided Peter. “I mean, redemption is kind of a big part of his whole deal.”
“Yeah, but even he couldn’t save everybody. You had to want him to, and you had to accept him and all that.”
“So now you know how Jesus works?” Peter shot back. “You were there, did you ever hear him say that?”
“I don’t remember,” admitted Marty. “I think it’s in the bible, though. Somewhere. Isn’t it?”
“Well, you know there’s a bunch of stuff in that book that doesn’t even belong there,” Peter said. "There are so many different versions at this point, and it’s lost so much in translation. Not to mention that a lot of it is shit that people just made up.”
Peter chuckled a little at his own words. He tried not to let it sound condescending, but it was hard when he was nearly as all-knowing as God at this point. He understood things on such a different level than most beings, and definitely more than Marty. Marty had such potential, though. He just had a lot to learn, and it was stuff that you can’t really teach; it came with experience. Unfortunately, Marty didn’t seem to want to experience things. He just wanted to skate through time, doing as little work as possible. He thought that Marty deserved better for himself, so he wasn’t going to give up on him just yet.
Besides, he genuinely liked Marty. He reminded him of humans in some ways, and that was rare. Most angels had lost their humanity. More accurately, they never possessed it in the first place. They weren’t human, they were heavenly beings, created long before human beings even existed. Still, God made both angels and humans somewhat in Its own image, which is possible because God was a multitude of things, made up of more elements and possessing so many facets that it gave even Peter a headache when he tried to comprehend it.
Which might be why all the beings he created seemed so disjointed at times, and felt pulled in so many directions at once. Perhaps that’s why people were dichotomies unto themselves. They were too complex because they were made up of all different traits of an immortal and omnipresent being that they had no hope of understanding. It’s hard to find peace when every part of you feels at odds with the rest of you.
Peter liked people as well. There is some confusion about Peter, as most people think of him as Saint Peter, who once walked the earth as a human. He was not. He was an angel, created at the dawn of time like all true angels; he just happened to share a name with an apostle. He kind of bristled when people thought of him as that Peter when they arrived here. Saint Peter had been kind of a mess. He wound up denying his lord when push came to shove, and the Catholics didn’t do him any favors. When Jesus said that he was the rock upon which he would build his church, he didn’t mean it so literally. Still, the overzealous and literal christian extremists went out and found a rock they claimed Saint Peter was buried under, and built a church on it, and named the church Peter as well, for good measure. So yeah, he liked humans, but they could be really weird at times.
And as much as he liked them, he had to keep his relationship with them from becoming personal. He had to maintain professional detachment, although it was hard sometimes. It didn’t used to be. Back in the beginning, he didn’t have much problem with it, but now that he had become more familiar with humans, interacting with them for millennia and all that, he saw that it wasn’t always their fault. He saw that many of them didn’t even have a chance. They were born into situations they had no chance of rising above. They were victimized and left behind by everyone and everything that was supposed to protect them and nurture them. Some of them were sick, and didn’t know any better. How was he going to judge people whose own body chemistry and the electric flashes in their brains sabotaged them at every point?
So he shook all that off and did his job, at least for the most part. He knew that some of them were evil and just plain horrible. Irredeemable, as Marty had said. Still, it seemed that a lot was up to his discretion. He had learned that he could fudge the rules here and there, and since he was apparently allowed to do it, it must be part of His Divine Plan. Of course, Peter knew that wasn’t really proof of anything. That was more like Marty’s logic, but he seemed to have a point.
Sometimes Peter thought that part of the whole Divine Plan and free choice was that beings could change and grow, and it was figured into the equation. It was self-correcting, and maybe that meant that he was in charge of the correcting part of that, just another cog in the machine. For whatever reason, growth and change happened, and that was part of the whole point of existence, wasn’t it? If not, why even bother with existence at all?
All of which meant that Marty was capable of growth and change as well. And if not, at least he was amusing and helped pass the time. Peter didn’t sleep, and God knows he needed something to help pass the monotony of living his life wide awake at all times. The day in, day out tedium he experienced was like nothing Marty could ever comprehend. Even now, he existed in many dimensions simultaneously. Beings were dying every second, and not just on earth. He was occupied every moment, in an infinite number of realities, and conscious of every single one. It was a lot to handle.
“I don’t think any of it really matters at all,” Marty was saying now. “It’s all been planned out, and one stupid human in the history of civilization isn’t going to matter very much, right?”
“Well,” said Peter, “He sees every sparrow …”
“Does He, though?” Marty interrupted. “Does He really? Because He might see them, but He doesn’t seem to want to help them or save them or make their lives any better, does He? I mean, what’s the point of spending eternity obsessively staring at birds if you’re not going to do anything about it?”
“Who say He doesn’t?” Asked Peter.
“Don’t play that game with me,” Marty laughed. “I’m not some wide-eyed, recently deceased Southern Baptist housewife showing up here. I know the whole “He works in mysterious ways” routine.””
“Sorry, force of habit,” admitted Peter. “Still, who are you to question His ways?”
“Show me where it says that I can’t,” Marty said. “I mean, if something makes no sense, I should be allowed to call it out.”
“Makes no sense on your level of understanding,” Peter reminded him.
“Yeah, okay, but if you spent your life watching birds fall, wouldn’t you be tempted to help them out at least once or twice? At some point, it’s psychotic. I mean, even Trump would help a puppy if he saw it suffering.”
“Are you sure about that?” Asked Peter.
“Okay, bad example,” admitted Marty
“I guess we could try an experiment,” Peter said.
“No, I don’t think we need to …”
“Yes, send him down to help some poor dying puppy,” Peter continued
Marty thought about how much the whole Carl incident bummed him out, and shuddered to think about what having Trump try to save a puppy would be like.
“No puppies!” He practically shouted at Peter. Peter laughed and relented.
“No, I wouldn’t take that chance either,” he told Marty. “But you are going to have to take him back down and try again.”
“Yeah, I know.” Marty knew this was going to be the outcome all along. He was just blowing off steam. He sighed, not in the usual way he had been sighing regularly since Trump arrived, but in a deep, exasperated way that comes with existential dread.
“What’s bothering you, Marty?” Peter was asking him now, genuinely interested. As interested as he could be, because in another dimension he was currently handling an influx of victims from a genocide on the other side of the galaxy.
“I keep thinking about that Carl guy,” Marty said. “I wonder if he’s going to make it.”
“One thing you have to learn is that humans are very tough and resilient,” Peter explained. “They can really surprise you sometimes with their tenacity and cleverness.”
Marty never quite noticed until now that Peter really seemed to have a soft spot for human beings. He joked about it with him occasionally, but he never seriously believed that Peter actually cared.
“I don’t believe it,” he exclaimed. “You actually care about all those little cretins down there, don’t you?” He laughed at the thought of it. Instead of being embarrassed, Peter sat there considering it.
“Yes,” he finally admitted, “I guess I do. You don’t spend an eternity watching and judging them without gaining a little admiration.”
“Well,” said Marty, “I hope I never get that pathetic.”
“Oh, no?” Peter replied. “Want to take a little peek at how Carl is doing?”
Marty glared at him. That wasn’t fair. It was too fresh. Besides, Carl was just one person, and he had been there and seen how sad he was, and how Trump had destroyed him. Then again, Carl wouldn’t remember any of that, so maybe it wasn’t so bad. Then he thought about how they had found him, his head in his hands, on the verge of tears, as hopeless as he had ever seen anyone.
“Well,” he said to Peter, “You weren’t there.”
“I kind of was.”
“You were watching from a distance,” Marty corrected him. “You weren’t in that room, watching that guy fall apart.”
“True enough,” Peter conceded. “Would you like to take a look at him now?”
Marty sighed. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to, and saying yes meant admitting to Peter that he did care, at least a little, but his curiosity got the better of him.
“Okay,” he relented. “Pull him up.”
Peter waved his hand, and in front of them, Carl appeared on a screen. He was home now, in his kitchen, eating dinner with his family. His daughter was telling him all about her day of virtual learning, and his son was interrupting with his own story about a video game he had been playing earlier.
Carl seemed okay. His wife was there, listening intently to the two competing stories as well. She looked at her husband, and they smiled at each other.
Soon dinner was over, and the kids went into the family room to watch TV, and Carl and his wife started cleaning up.
“What are our options here?” She asked him.
“I really don’t know,” Carl replied. “I’m going to talk to the accountant tomorrow, he thinks he has some ideas. I have a call in to our lawyer as well.”
“Worse comes to worse, the business folds and we both go back to work,” his wife told him.
“Yeah, I guess …” Carl’s face looked troubled again.
“Hey,” his wife was telling him now. “Whatever comes, we’ll get through it together. I love you.”
“I love you too,” Carl told her. “You’re right, and I don’t want to think about it anymore tonight. Let’s just be thankful for what we have and count our blessings.”
“Exactly,” his wife said, “and besides, at least Trump is dead!”
Carl and Marty both laughed at that, and both of them felt better. For a moment, when Carl heard Trump’s name, it almost sparked a memory, but it was gone as quickly as it came.
“You see?” Peter said. “Resilient!” He almost looked proud.
“Okay, you win. I’ll try again,” Marty said.
“That’s the spirit!” Peter clapped him on the back. “It will be better this time, wait and see.”
“Do you really believe that?” Marty asked.
“Oh, what does it matter what I believe?” Peter replied. “Bye!”
In a flash Marty was sitting back in the room with Trump on the couch, looking annoyed as usual.
“Now what are we doing?” Trump asked, already sounding exasperated.
“I don’t know,” replied Marty, smiling. “Let’s find out, shall we?”
The wall turned into a screen again, and Marty started to look it over for the next situation to plop the living monkey wrench named Trump into.
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