Your Orisons May Be Recorded (2 page)

I hate telling them no.

Those of us whose work is out in the world call the phone lines an easy job. I say,
you
try finding fifty different ways to tell people that all their prayers won't save their home, their business, their kids. Try persuading those people to stay signed up to the long-term plan.

I don't like it when they shout at me, but I understand. That's practically what we're here for, to be shouted at. We're here to sit and take all that fury and frustration and tamp it down into something manageable. Angry people boil over with life, raging and raging. They fascinate me.

What I really dread are the quiet ones. The ones who say very little. Sometimes they cry very, very softly, hoping you won't hear them, which just makes it worse.

They all get through to us eventually. That's why it's important to know where they're calling from. A Catholic with an urgent question about the propriety of cleaning consecrated wine off a good white carpet will get rankled if you quote the Koran by accident, and there you are and you've just lost a repeat client.

So I talk to the flood victims in my gentlest voice for an average of ten minutes and twenty-three seconds each.

Then I have a nice chat with a nun in Bolivia who really just wants Jesus to tell her where she's left her glasses this time.

I tell her they're by the sink. Miniature miracles are allowed for those who've signed the lifetime plan. Nobody believes them anyway.

Then there's a Satanist kid in a hospital in Dallas, having his stomach pumped and calling on Lucifer and all his many minions to slaughter his enemies and bring him a dose of medical-grade morphine to get him through the night.

I hand that one over to Gremory. He lives for this sort of thing.

“Hello,” I hear him say, “my name is Legion. How can I help you?”

Eventually he persuades the kid that he doesn't need to call on Satan to destroy his squat-mates with fire and fetch him drugs, he needs to call his mother.

Then we go for dinner. Grem has three hot dogs and reads me extracts from
High Times.

Grem is happy because on Thursday afternoons they play heavy metal over the main speakers, rather than the usual airport music. Apparently heavy metal is calming and improves our productivity. I have another coffee.

“Are you there, God?”

The next caller is six or seven years old at the most. Before answering, I wait for the standard message to play over the still, small song, remote and clear:

Your prayer will be answered by the next available operative. Please note that we cannot take requests for miracles over the phone. Your orisons may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes.

“You're speaking to a member of the heavenly host. How can I help you tonight?”

“Is that Jesus?” A little girl's voice. I check the location: Cape Town. It's morning there.

“No,” I say, “but I'm— I'm friends with Jesus.” This is an acceptable lie to tell to children. Nobody has seen the Nazarene in two thousand years.

“I'm friends with Jesus, too!” says the little girl. “Can I talk to him?”

“Not just now,” I say, “but I can take a message for Jesus and he'll definitely listen to it.”

“Oh. Okay. I just wanted to ask about my cat. His name is Lemon. My name is Carla. I'd like Jesus to please look after Granny and Lemon and make sure they don't die.”

Why are children always the hardest? Adults know not to ask for that sort of thing directly.

“Also, I'd like Jesus to kill Mr. George.”

“You can't really ask us to kill anyone, Carla,” I say. “That's not very nice. Who is Mr. George?”

“He's Mummy's boyfriend,” says Carla. “He hurts me sometimes. I was going to pray for him to go away, but then Mummy might go away too. So, really, it would be better if he just died.”

You can't fault her logic.

We're not allowed to smite wrongdoers with great vengeance, or even moderate vengeance. We're not allowed to make calls to social services. Human beings are supposed to sort things out by themselves, even six-year-old girls. We're just supposed to listen. That's all.

I hate my job sometimes.

“I'm afraid I can't kill Mr. George,” I tell her. “That's not allowed.” Carla starts to cry very quietly, as if she's worried someone might hear her.

“I understand that you're frustrated right now,” I say, reading lines off the on-screen handbook. “I'm just looking through your options for you. Hold the line, please.”

I press the mute button, and I lay my head on the desk for a while. Then I pick up the phone again.

“Well, Carla,” I say, “I've had a look, and unfortunately we're not able to murder Mr. George for you today. What I can do for you, though, is make the bad feelings go away for a bit. I can make them go deep down inside you where they won't bother you until you're grown up. How does that sound?”

The snuffly sound of a small nose being wiped. “Okay.”

I tap in some numbers. Eventually, Carla stops sniffling. I cut the call after twenty-three minutes. Across from me, Gremory is nodding to a client and rocking out to
The Number Of The Beast
.

The floor manager calls me in toward the end of the shift. Apparently I've been slacking on my call quota. I spend too long talking to each client.

“Some of them have a lot of problems,” I say, inspecting the carpet.

“They all have a lot of problems,” says Uriel, who used to be a big shot back in the days when everyone with more than six wings got to call themselves a Duke of Heaven. Now that there are so many more humans and we've had to move with the times and go to full automation, he wears a suit.

“We're not here to fix the problems,” Uriel says. “We're here to deliver the maximum amount of spiritual satisfaction in the shortest possible time period. That's why we have the seven-minute target. A target you haven't been meeting.”

“Look,” I say, “sometimes it just takes longer than seven minutes. Sometimes these people really, really need someone to talk to. I listen. Until they're finished. It seems to make them feel better.”

“Yes, we've been noticing a lot of dead air on your side of the line,” says Uriel. His voice is milk trickling over smooth marble.

“How many of my calls have you been listening to?”

“Don't get snippy. I checked the database. It's easy enough to monitor the quality and content of the call load. It's standard procedure. I can't believe I'm telling you this again. You're not a special case.

“We're stretched thin,” says Uriel. “I don't want to bump you down to maintenance, when we're getting a higher call intake every day, but I will if I have to.”

The conversation is over. My hands shake as I return to my desk. It's probably the coffee.

*   *   *

Why do we do this? Why do we keep on picking up the phone?

Because religion is a necessary drug. It takes the pain away, for a while. A little candle to nurse in the chest cavity against the darkness. Except some of them burn too fiercely, and it eats them from within.

Only love comes close. Only love.

I loved a mad nun once, in Castile. He had come to the convent the way he was born, with a woman's body, until he was bricked up in the wall of a convent, where he starved away his female aspect in secret. The nuns never found out. Only I saw him as he truly was, as a man entire.

He never left that cell. He was there to burn hard in solitude. The nuns had a system for this, and left a small opening at the bottom of the wall where they could push in water, ink, and dry black bread, which my lover fed to the birds.

He prayed and fasted on his knees until the bricks sliced through to the raw bone. He shaved his head and covered the walls with poetry.

I was all over it.

He did not seem at all surprised to see me when I appeared in his cell. I took the form of a woman at first, but I soon realized my mistake, and put on a man's skin, tanned deeply from the sun my lover had not seen for years. I held his birdlike head in my hands, feeling the contours of his skull. His mouth opened and I fed him crumbs of passion.

He drew me a hundred times over. He called me the body of Christ, but wouldn't let me fuck him. Instead I pushed into him with my fingers, reached deep into his cunt and beckoned, beckoned, as if I could coax him out to walk with me through the wall and into the world of light.

I thought I could keep him alive with my love.

His flesh withered and clung to the bones, and eventually those gave out, too, and he wasted further until all that was left was the heart, beating wildly on the floor of the cell, and a voice raised in fervor. He craved that holy passion so hard that it cannibalized him.

Wants versus needs.

I walked out through the wall and mourned for a century. Then I went back to work.

*   *   *

When I return to the cubicle, Gremory is spinning around to
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
in his desk chair. He gives me a thumbs-up.

Ten minutes to go before the end of the shift. This is the time when you hope to—well, you just hope that nobody calls with a problem you might actually be able to solve. So of course the line flashes.

“Hello, you've come through to the heavenly host, how can I help you today?”

“I'm trying to find my way to heaven.”

I appreciate directness at the end of the day. There's an answer for this in the manual, filed under “Convenient Fictions.”

“That's great,” I say. “You've come to the right place. The path to heaven is hard, but it starts within all of us. May I take your name, sir?”

“Benjamin— Sorry, is this the right number?”

The client's voice is young, male, run through with booze and the lightest scent of self-loathing.

“You did say you were interested in getting to heaven, sir?”

“Yes, that's right. I've been looking for it for an hour now.”

“Well, it's wonderful that you're making an effort, sir. Unfortunately, it usually takes longer than an hour to find one's way to heaven. Many people spend entire lifetimes and more in the search.”

“It says on Google Maps that it's just off Charing Cross Road.”

“I assure you, sir,” I say, “heaven cannot be accessed from the Charing Cross Road. May I ask how you came to God in the first place?”

“I'm not religious. I'm looking for Heaven. I've got a sound test there in twenty minutes. Look, I'm sorry, I really think I've got the wrong number. Sorry for wasting your time.”

“No, wait,” I say, because a thought has occurred to me. “Let me put you on hold for a second.”

I slam on the mute button and whisper across the cubicle at Gremory, “Is there a bar or a club called Heaven somewhere in London?”

Grem nods. “Oh, another one of those. I've got the address written down somewhere.”

He slides a Post-it across the desk. I unmute the caller.

“Thank you for holding, sir. You want to turn off down Villiers Street, toward the river, and it's under the arches on your right.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Dead air.

“Well, uh,” says Benjamin, “I'm having trouble with this song I'm writing. It's about love. Love and death. And anger. Love and death and anger.”

I sit up straight in my chair.

“Would you like to talk about it?” I say. “We could talk about it for a while.”

“It's just that I'm afraid all the time,” he says, and his voice has receded to a trembling note, a quaver. “I'm afraid of the songs. I'm afraid of the songs I could make, and I'm afraid of not making them. It's stupid.”

A meaty thud. He's smashed his head against something, on purpose.

“Don't do that,” I say. “Please don't do that. I can help.”

“Who are you?” asks Benjamin.

I can hear his heart, the broken-bird flutter of it. His breath on the line.

I have had so many names.

“I'm listening,” I say. “I'm listening.”

*   *   *

We're not supposed to Worldwalk during the working week, so Gremory and I hang out on top of Centre Point, the dirty-white 1960s monstrosity that squats mantislike above Tottenham Court Road Tube Station.

“Best view in London,” says Gremory. “Mainly because it's the only place you can't see Centre Point. You want some of this?”

He's sucking on a finger-joint stub of spliff, exhaling thick smoke that sweetens the traffic fumes rising from the street.

“I'm okay,” I say. “Thanks.”

“Seriously,” he says, “I'm not trying to pressure you, but I really think it'd be good for you to smoke this stuff occasionally. Chill you out a bit.”

“Really, I'm good with just coffee.” I love coffee. I particularly like it the way the fashion kids make it, in a goblet shaped like a breast with a picture of a heart frothed on top. I love all that stuff.

“See, that's what I'm talking about,” says Gremory. He takes another deep draw and closes his eyes. “Of all the things I'm going to miss when they're gone, I think a beer and a spliff round the back of a decent bar is right up there.”

Gremory once laid waste to an entire city-state in Sumer and made its rivers flow with gore. He's calmed down a bit now, and I think he's happier for it. I'm envious.

The last of the sun is dipping its sucked-sherbet into the sugary sky over Oxford Street. We watch it disappear.

“Mastodon are playing in Brixton tonight,” says Gremory, after a while. “You want to come?”

“Nah, I'm good,” I say. “I think I'll head on back upstairs.”

“See, you say that, my friend,” says Grem, tapping out his spliff and tucking the end in the pocket of his denim jacket, “but you know and I know that you're going to wait till I'm gone, then get all hopped up on Dexedrine and find something long-haired and broken to fuck you into oblivion.”