Mission Impossible
The greatest prank ever played.
For reasons that will become obvious, I meant to publish this yesterday. Commitments of life and love intervened, as they often do.
In retrospect, maybe missing this particular deadline was for the best. You be the judge.
During an online chat with some friends on Holy Saturday, I wrote the following:
As I sit here contemplating a day that Christ spent in Hell (and as I stand verged on a potential mini-Hell of my own), the thought occurred that comedy itself is a kind of renewal and magic trick. The punchline and the revelation are in alignment, and it's the good kind of alignment.
One of the problems I've always had with the world's religions is their dour seriousness. Some artists like Douglas Adams tried to repair this by going 100,00,000 miles in the opposite direction. Neither seems to be the truth. Which is not to say, "the truth lies in between" or "the truth is balance." The truth is just obviously true, and is more often than not funny.
It turned out my “mini-Hell” wasn’t so hellacious after all, an outcome for which I am eternally grateful. But that misty thought about comedy stuck with me, and demanded more questions to shape it.
First:
By “magic trick”, did I really mean “miracle”?
Maybe that’s a question of semantics, or one where the answer depends on who’s using those terms and why. But one thing I know about staged magic tricks is that there’s often an element of comedy to the best ones. People want to be delighted as well as amazed, and so a comic twist can really turn a merely competent trick into a great one.
But does this principle holds true for miracles as well? I think it might. My suspicion is that the best miracles can even involve a “trick” of sorts, while still revealing and glorifying the awesome might of God.
Second:
Does that mean God can be funny?
I think the answer is a resounding yes. In fact, the word “funny” is probably a vast understatement: Cram all of history’s greatest comic minds in a writer’s room for a trillion centuries, and they wouldn’t be able to dream up a funnier punchline than the platypus, or the fact that this little cutie is loaded with enough necrotic venom to literally melt your face off.
But it ain’t just about punchlines, folks. The secret of all the best comedy is that it sheds light on truth. Often we’ll laugh because we realize these truths are obvious ones, but we’re either too embarrassed or too scared to say them out loud. We also might be too distracted by all the other crap going on in our lives to notice them as being true at all.
Now consider the kinds of truth that only the Ultimate Observer would notice, and then imagine the brightest conceivable spotlight aimed at one of those. You might not literally “die laughing” at such almighty zingers, but you could come dangerously close.
None of this means we’ll always “get” God’s sense of humor. We humans can be pretty dense at times, so even His funniest lines might whizz straight over our heads. I think that’s especially the case when God pulls practical jokes. The secret of those is that the targets don’t find them remotely funny while they’re in progress. Maybe we can giggle at ourselves afterwards, once Ashton Kutcher springs from the shadows and yells, “You just got punk’d!” But while the trick is being played, our reactions can range anywhere from outrage to mortal terror.
So, how does all of this relate to miracles?
In particular, how might it relate to the greatest miracle of all? Would it be blasphemy to notice an angle of (Divine) comedy in it? If that’s the case, know that I haven’t blasphemed in my heart (which is especially joyful today). But even so, I still run the risk of committing the mortal comedy sin of “explaining the joke.”
On the other hand, what the heck’s this blog about, if not taking a bunch of stupid risks?
The joke I’ll try to explain isn’t the one played on those ghosts of Rome. That prank would take a very long time play out (and some might say it hasn’t finished yet).
This one was played within a much shorter timeframe, and in a realm where speed and distance don’t operate in quite the same way. In that domain, all potential pasts and futures look blended and entwined, in ways that would give the best sci-fi writers migraines. From one perspective, you might say that all events are unfurling in an Eternal Moment, which is nonetheless reshaped as the potentialities change. Even Rod Serling would be baffled.
But that doesn’t mean that nothing ever happens there. As in our dreams, events still transpire and organize themselves into stories. I get the sense that the Story Law is a primordial force, more ancient than gravity, magnetism, thermodynamics and all other physical principles and quanta. It’s the fundamental reason that anything has ever happened, or ever will.
All that to say: Let me tell you a funny story.
Room to Spare
By Mark Bisone
So here we see the Devil lounging in his throne room down in Hell, surrounded by the spoil of a massive feast. The party’s over now, its host having defenestrated or digested all attendees hours ago. He wanted some Alone Time, to watch the final moments of his favorite show play out. The smile he wears is so Cheshire-wide, it threatens to break his jaw.
The star of this particular show is much worse than a mere “enemy”. Though his fanged and bloodstained mouth is rarely at a loss for words, the hatred Satan feels for him is unspeakably vast. Indeed, there were times when it hurt to even think about this insolent fool.
But not today. Today he is dying.
And dying bad.
The image of this idiot’s shattered, bloody form marked the King of Hell’s greatest cinematic achievement. Yes, he took credit for it all, bragged crowds of sycophantic minions to sleep about it. That’s nothing new, of course; when processed by the sparking wires and schizoid circuits of his brain, every single thing that ever happened did so according to his own Grand Designs, was a part of his Big Master Plan.
Nevertheless, he found certain elements of this finale episode surprised him. Some were so insanely entertaining he nearly laughed himself to ashes when he saw them.
Rex Iudaeorum!
BAW HAW HAW HAW!
And that thorny crown! What a touch!
MOO HOO HA HA HA!
The laughter was phony, of course, every bit as mechanical as that black motor in his chest he calls a heart. But Satan figured Somebody might be watching him, and wanted to put on a show of his own. Which isn’t to say these little surprises didn’t fill him with glee, that upside-down “joy” of the abyss. He decides to personally thank whichever artists were responsible for those fine details, before he dissects them on a dinner plate.
But in the end, the laugh riot became exhausting. In the end he found he could only leer and drool. It wasn’t just the star’s physical suffering that he relished; the faces of this man’s pathetic friends and family stirred a bottomless hunger in him. The shame and the horror. All that gorgeous bewilderment and fury and abasement and forever-loss. He felt a sudden urge to lick their tears off the screen, to gorge himself on every last drop of this final heartbreak.
Were you deceived, little lambs?
Did you just fall for the oldest trick in the book?
Haw haw haw.
Then, the terror! The spear thrusts home, and the crowd jolts as if they themselves were stabbed. The Devil is jolted too, a billion-watt thrill crackling down his centipedal spine to the tip of the tail.
The shock is even more delicious in its aftermath. When the last breath escapes the man’s lung he exhales his own to mock it, a long plume of acrid smoke and horseflies and suicidal bats on fire.
Unbeknownst to him, he’s in for a very different kind of shock today.
What the Prince of Lies does not know about this man could fill ten thousand libraries. Because his head was installed with many powerful eyes, he assumed that he’d studied this guy from every possible angle, under every conceivable light. For instance, one eye saw the most delicate of flowers, to be plucked or stomped on a whim. Others saw the peasant, the weakling, the scapegoat, the unwitting pawn.
And yet, blinded by hubris, there was one critical angle and image that managed to escape his notice:
He never saw the Sword.
So when that final breath departs the body of this wandering schoolteacher, the last thing in the world the Devil expects to feel is fear.
And not just any fear, but an all-consuming, paralytic terror, dwarfing the kind he felt when he dueled Michael long ago. And even that ancient memory is something Satan’s long since rewritten in his mind, just as all of his failures and shortcomings are twisted upside down and backwards. He’s convinced himself that he cannot feel fear or frailty of any kind. These days he figures even the Fall itself wasn’t a legit defeat. He just tripped, that’s all. Could happen to anyone.
Alas, it turns out terror would be on the menu, today.
But before terror: dread.
Dread of the worst kind, in fact. Of that elongated, torturous species, slowly building to its crescendo.
The musical language is apt here, too. Because it all starts off with a song.
As you might expect, the typical soundtrack of Hell is the unholy wails and screams of the damned. This ambience is music to the ears of demons, and is loud enough that their dark master can hear it even through the castle walls. But now, his ears are picking up on a strange new note.
The sound’s so faint at first, he thinks he might be imagining it. So he tries to distract himself with other thoughts, conjures images of rapes and gory murder scenes, of burning buildings and toxic sewage floods. But the tiny sound simply will not go away.
Instead, it continues to grow, both in volume and complexity. One note becomes many, played with such mastery that he nearly recognizes the tune. Know that the song itself isn’t one our human ears are equipped to hear. At best we can pick up certain ghostly notes and phrases, then try to emulate them with our crude instruments and vocal chords. But our versions can never be one-to-one accurate, and all the orchestras and choirs on Earth couldn’t account for every melodious pitch and tone. Indeed, we can’t even begin to describe it.
So, in lieu of attempting such an impossible description, try reading the rest of this tale with this little ditty playing in the background:
Back to the action!
So our buddy Beelzebub hears this song, slowly building as whatever’s playing it looms closer. As he listens more carefully he realizes it’s accompanied by a different kind of screaming, from a different kind of mouth.
The sound of these odd screams summons one of those distant memories, of that breed he likes to rewrite in his favor. But for some reason, this sonic file stubbornly refuses to change. He sees dark wounded shapes bellowing, falling…
No.
It can’t be.
He repeats this like a self-help mantra as he races to the tip of the spire. From that high vantage, he can see straight out to the fringes of his empire. So that’s exactly what he does, extending one of his telescopic eyes to full length towards a strange white pinprick in the distance.
And what it sees out there, zooming in from the obsidian wastes, shakes him to his core.
It is clearly the man himself, rendered in the most vivid detail. But it’s not only the man who marches forth. It is simultaneously something else. A blindingly luminous thing, composed of impossible angles and manifolds. Like the man’s own face, this shape is terrifying to behold. The parts are the whole are the parts, a tree that is also a river, recombinant spectral lightforms interweaving in ways both childishly simple and infinitely complex.
It is one with the man, and it is the man, and it is not the man.
And the whole shebang is headed right for him.
“To arms! To arms!” the Devil shrieks, suprised by the girlish tenor of his voice.
But his legions are already doing that, swarming to their dark kingdom’s defense. They look like insects at this range, and some of them actually are. They also happen to be the source of that terrible new screaming. The smaller fiends rake with their pincers, only to disintegrate on contact. The man bats others around like flies, skewers them like shrimp on the barbie, blows them to atoms with plasma beams and other strange munitions.
For the first time, an icy panic seizes the Great Deceiver by his silver throat. He recalls something he once read in a scary book, many eons ago.
Oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no…
Now, if you were an electrical engineer who could see the inner workings of this creature’s brain — all those haphazard thoughts skidding spastically from diode to diode — you might call 911. But before the meltdown starts in earnest, the opsec defense system lights up. It casts the old egoic spell, allowing him to flip the tale on its head.
This is perfect, he thinks.
Now he’s trapped in here with us. Exactly where we want him.
Heh heh heh.
A few moments later, he finds evidence for it. Here comes Count Nahum, loping across a meadow of shattered skulls. His wolfen form is Hell’s own motorcycle, equipped with an unparalleled appetite for destruction. As he closes in on his prey, a jet of napalm erupts from his spiky maw. The invader holds up a palm, deflecting it onto a platoon of shedim ninjas creeping through the thorn trees.
Crap!
But it’s not over. While they’re busy melting into puddles of ooze, Nahum transforms to raven-headed wrestler mode. He charges in, fanged beak snapping and squawking. But the man is faster. He snatches the fiend’s mouth shut, and utters a single word. The Count’s ripped and rugged body is instantly sliced to colorful ribbons.
As the Devil watches them flutter to the ground, the same haunting line from that old book squeezes its way into his brain again.
‘His mouth is a sword.’
Others come, and others fall. There’s Naberius, yipping and whimpering, speared by a lightsaber. And alas! Poor Sabnock! Knocked on his ass by some kind of flying roundhouse kick, then trampled into the muck by his own horse. These harrowing images are made all the worse by the music. The song is still growing in volume and in terrible, self-elaborating beauty as its singer marches on.
All of this should be nerve-wracking, at the very least. But the Demon Lord’s spell of confidence still holds firm.
Those dudes were all a bunch of losers! Benchwarmers and amateurs!
Wait’ll you meet the varsity squad, fuckface!
MOO HOO HA HA HA HA!
It’s at this moment he notices something weird about the invader’s movements. Instead of making a beeline for the castle, the man’s path is winding in a spiral, like a satellite’s orbit decaying in a gravity well. This confuses him at first.
Then suddenly he realizes something else this man-light’s doing.
As he rips his agents to shreds, the song draws the souls of the damned into his wake. All their chains and leg-irons and straightjackets snap apart like Happy Meal toys, and they run too fast for their tormentors to catch up. Worse, all their gruesome wounds and mutilations are healing at time-lapse speed, like that X-Man with the funny haircut and the claws.
And while they’re not quite shining or singing yet, some of them are beginning to glow, and to hum along.
Satan frantically yanks out his iPhone, swipes the screen. Fingers trembling, he tries to send a group text to the emergency crew.
But it’s no good. There are no bars.
Something — or Someone — is jamming the signal.
Crap crap crap crap crap crap…
A day goes by.
Here we see the Devil again: not in his throne room, this time, but in the “Situation Room.” He’s not lounging either, but rather sits hunched at the head of a long table, his sweaty paws clutched beneath his nose. He has shapeshifted into his presidential form, complete with immaculately tailored suit and tie. But even that has begun to rumple and stain, at the end of this very long day.
Seated around the table are his top guys, his kings and dukes. Turns out he had to summon them the old-fashioned way, sending headless crows and drill-toothed sandworms and other analog heralds. But even now, with all these powerful agents assembled, the mood is tense and grim.
The only one standing at the moment is Asteroth, transformed now into a military intelligence officer with a chest full of medals. He’s guiding the others through a huge, holographic 3D map of Hell, projected from an aperture at the table’s center. The map is fully animated, showing the positions and movements of the various legions and commanders.
But as Balaam pointed out earlier, the data wasn’t “real-time.” Something was causing a shitload of lag and other funky glitches.
Something.
Satan fixed his eyes on the Something in question. What began as a pinprick on the horizon had become a blazing white comet with an ever-growing tail. He watches as it slowly sweeps across his realm, lighting up tiny particles in its wake that quickly merge with it. It looked to him like some kind of documentary on particle physics or magnetic fields. Something cool like that.
Except nothing about this situation was remotely “cool.”
“And if you look here in the Tarturus sector,” says Asteroth, “you can see the same effect. The time-skips look like they originate on some kind of oscillating substrate of the metanoia layer…”
Barbatos chimes in. “Yeah, yeah, I get all that. But how in Satan’s name do some of them skip backwards?”
“We… don’t know. But we’re working on it.”
“Well work faster, bitch!”
“Fuck you, Barry!”
Another shouting match ignites. President Satan puts a stop to this one by smashing his fist on the table.
“Listen. I know you’re all overworked, under slept, yadda yadda. But this…”
He stands dramatically, points one manicured claw at the center of the comet.
“This is what you should all be focused on. Figure out how to eliminate this, and the rest of the problem will solve itself. Who cares about their ‘metanoia’. They’re still stuck here, after all. If anything, it stands to our great advantage in the long run!”
He checks their faces for signs of cognition, but only gets bunch of dull-eyed, sheepish stares in reply.
Fabulous. Some brain trust you got here.
“Idiots! Don’t you get it?
“Just look at ‘em. All those ‘saved’ souls, trapped down here with us on the abyssal plane.
“An eternal feast of vengeance against You-Know-Who! No temptation or DoorDash required.
“C’mon, people! Where’d your greed go?”
Satan starts to chuckle, low and seamy. Eventually the rest of them join along, in what swells into a raucous bout of maniacal laughter.
“Now get out of here!” the POTUS screams. “And don’t come back without that sonofabitch’s head, or a plan to take it.”
Many hours pass.
The Devil is no longer president. His cabinet has been dissolved. Literally.
He has since shifted into mad scientist mode, complete with frizzy hair and labcoat. Watch as he races about his top secret laboratory: jabbing buttons and throwing switches, punching code into space-age terminals and laughing himself hoarse while he does. As with all his laughter, there’s a strategy behind it.
He’s trying to drown out the song, the anthem. Even in this underground facility, the sound bleeds through the walls. It’s accompanied by an epic chorus now, countless millions of singers who’ve somehow regaining their tongues and throats and lungs and beating hearts.
But it is of no concern.
The mad scientist is mad, and in his madness Dr. Lou Cypher has come up with the ultimate solution. For untold eons he’d been sneaking down here, to develop his secret weapons projects away from all potential spying eyes. These cunning inventions were meant to be unleashed on Doomsday, obviously, and so none of them were properly field-tested. But the “situation” being what it is, he figured he had no choice but to pull the trigger now.
When all instruments are finally configured and set, the doctor takes a deep breath, and presses one last button.
There comes a great sound of churning wheels, gasping vacuums, liquids gushing from giant vats and tanks.
One by one his experiments are unleashed:
See the Thousand-Headed Lion! With anacondas for tongues and rocket-thruster legs!
Witness the fury of the Shark Tornado! Winds that can flay the skin from your bones! Psychotic fish strapped with A.I. laser cannons and nuclear bombs!
Gaze upon the awesome majesty of the Flying Spaghetti Monster! A quadrillion squidly tendrils, strong enough to pull moons from their orbits! A mouth that can chew up planetoids, and spit out meteor showers!
YES! YES!
Fly my pretties, fly!
Show them all exactly WHO they’re fucking with!
It’s the end of the second day.
The Devil is not in his throne room. Not in his Situation Room. Not in his super duper top secret underground gain-of-function lab.
El Diablo is in his bedroom. Hiding under his bed.
The events of the past 48 hours have burned his mind down to a cinder. The best it can manage at the moment is to whisper, “How? How?” But there is no answer he can conceive of.
The music has finally stopped. In fact, Hell is an unnervingly quiet place today. The souls haven’t departed — not yet, at least. The last he saw of them they were holding a silent vigil at the foot of the keep. It was the second scariest thing the Adversary ever saw. The scariest was on its way up the stairs to greet him, its footsteps the only sound left in the world.
In fact, when he first saw it enter, smashing through the doors like they were balsa, the Devil was so freaked out that he turned into a withered old hag as he fled, and then into a cartoon mouse in suspenders, and then a toy spider with a windup key. By the time he reached his boudoir he had shrunk into a quivering amoeba, which squeezed itself between two fibers of the rug.
But the man kept coming. It’s like he knew just where to look.
The door creaks open. A pair of feet approach, titanic by comparison. There was no escape now. Any move he made might be his last.
If he were a man, he might’ve prayed for a miracle to save him. But the Devil is not a man. Indeed, what he is is something even lowlier than an amoeba. That’s why asking “How?” was the best that he could manage. The How of things is all he ever cared about, and he is damned to pursue the answer fruitlessly forever.
A face dips down under the bed skirt.
It is the face. The same one he tempted for forty days, the face he offered all the kingdoms of the world, if only its owner would kneel before him. He’s kneeling now, of course — just not in the way he imagined or ever wanted.
The man’s right brow is softly arching upwards, in that slightly amused way that used to annoy the piss out of him during their encounters. Now, like everything else about this man, he finds it strictly terrifying. Same goes for that mysterious, knowing smile. When the lips part to speak, the Enemy of God finds it wishes it was never born at all.
“Boo,” Christ says.
Upon hearing this, the amoeboid shrinks into a molecule, then an electron, then a solitary quark.
So when the man leaves afterward, and leads his flock to Heaven, he doesn’t even notice.
The third day has begun.
The Devil is back in his throne room. He has already reconstituted his form (or most of it, anyway; there’s still a few missing fingers, eyes and other bits). He sits in place, watching the screen again. Weeping.
The Devil’s tears are fraudulent by default. Like all his other displays of human feeling, they are designed to deceive, manipulate and torment.
But not today.
Today the tears are real. Because today, he is the one to suffer torment.
The new image on the screen is the source of his tormented, impossible misery. Turns out that his favorite show wasn’t cancelled after all. Someone had renewed all contracts on the sly, including that of its leading star.
And so there he was, standing beside the open tomb. His face and body was still scarred, still bruised and battered into unrecognizable shapes. Ordinarily, such a sight would’ve struck the Devil as delightful. Today, it most certainly did not.
There were other details, too, as horrible as the previous ones were intoxicating. In the background of the shot, for instance, he could see the rock had been rolled away. In the middle of a snot-choked, self-pitying wail, he paused to wonder who did that.
Was it his friends, pulling off some daring midnight caper?
Did he do it himself?
How?
Then it was back to mindless blubbering. He had a million questions, which he would ask himself obsessively in all the decades and centuries to come. For now, he only knew that he’d been punked. Totally schooled. The Grand Trickster himself, tricked into killing the only man capable of using Death to his strategic advantage.
And not just a man. A light. A sword.
A song.
He almost missed it now. Hell was so quiet you could hear a nanite drop.
He knew it wouldn’t be like this for long. The others would reconstitute as well, in time, all those princes and dukes and such. Even the lesser fiends were bound to make their comebacks, in some suitably hideous form. He thought of this feature as more evidence of his own mighty powers, rather than the curse it was.
But today all was silent, and he was alone.
When the woman recognizes the man past all his wounds, Satan feels that lance poke through his own ribcage. Unable to bear any more, he changes the channel, flipping to some show set a couple of thousand years in the future.
It’s a weird one, for sure. It stars some lowly cat, typing words on a labtop in his tiny New York apartment. Apparently they’ll put anything on TV, these days. Or was this the internet now? Who knows?
In any case, Old Scratch wipes away a tear, then extends that telescopic eye to find out what this puny fool is writing.
As if to help him out, the little dweeb jacks up the font size…
Dear Satan,
April Fools’ Day, you big dummy!
(Up) Yours Truly,
Mark
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Loved it! I hope it's ok that I had the Kill Bill theme playing in my head instead.
Outstanding. Well done.
God's blessings to you and your family.