Free The Life of Hope by Paul Quarrington Page A

would acknowledge nothing so petty as “dreams”) wherein his body was stripped naked and began to float. Joseph realized that he was entering Paradise, although the journey was bumpier than he’d expected, accompanied by little grunts. The Gates to Heaven also screeched like a door with hinges long deprived of grease. And instead of being blinded by a glorious radiance, Joseph Hope found it increasingly difficult to see, things getting dimmer and dimmer. Hope discovered that he could turn his head to the side, and having done so, saw that his fellow Angels were old men, old gray men from whom Time had stolen body parts; teeth, eyes, even arms and legs. These old men lay on little cots, motionless, and Joseph would have thought them devoid of life except that their collective breathing sent out a great, wheezy wail.
    Joseph began to suspect that he wasn’t in Heaven, if only because he couldn’t imagine that it was necessary to breathe in Paradise. Experimentally, Hope held his breath. For many a long moment Hope was satisfied that he had no need of air. Then his lungs shuddered and forced his mouth open, and Hope pulled in great drafts, more smoke than anything else. Smoke? thought Joseph Hope. Quickly he turned his head the other way, and there in the darkness roared a great red fire. J. B. Hope hadn’t truly expected eternal damnation, but he acceptedhis judgment immediately. He was lowered on to a cot, one just beside the fire, and covered with a sheet.
    “Theah,” said a voice, “that should keep him all toasty.”
    At one point Hope opened his eye (this was the ultimate irony of Hell, apparently, that you still had to endure corporeal tediums, your eyes opening and closing, your heart and lungs thudding along without desire or end) and suspended above him was a face. Oddly, this was a kindly face. The man’s eyes were huge and slightly crossed, and made the face look a little addled, perhaps even stupid. But the smile he wore seemed genuine and heartfelt, framed on either side by healthy red cheeks. The face moved closer, more of the body coming into view. Hope got the impression of outlandish largeness, for the man’s head (which had in itself seemed big) looked dwarfed upon his massive shoulders. Hope closed his eye again, and didn’t open it for a good long while. When he did, the face was still there, but now it had transformed itself into a hideous parody of femininity, a wig of girlish blond curls attached to the skull. The eyes, still slightly crossed, had been ludicrously adorned with long lashes, which were being batted rapidly. The face loomed closer, and Hope saw that the mountainous body had been stuffed into female attire, although the musculature threatened to rend the garments to tatters. Hope shuddered, rammed his eye shut and refused to open it again, afraid of any further transmogrifications.
    “ ’Ey!” came a voice. “This ’ere is Joe Hope!”
    “Joe Hope?” came another. “What’s he doing here?”
    “Not bloody much!” the first voice returned with a phlegmy cackle. “Looks like he’s got the ork-orks.”
    Joseph’s body had begun to twitch convulsively, his limbs lashing out, his toes and fingers trembling. Hope had stoically accepted this as some brand of punishment, but this diagnosis of “ork-orks” made sudden sense. Someone gave a second opinion. “That’s the whoops and jingles if ever I saw it!” J. B. Hope became almost deliriously happy. He had the whoops and jingles, the blue horrors, alcohol dementia. Joseph Hope opened his eye and announced, “Then I’m alive!”
    An old man stood next to his bed, a man whose right arm had been reduced to a tiny stump. “Oh, you be alive, all right, Hope. But once you’ve had a bowl of Miss Martha’s chowder, you’ll wish you warn’t!”
    The old men explained it all to Joe Hope. They were ensconced in the Harbor Light Mission, an establishment operated by George and Martha Quinton. All of them, the old men