I know I’ve made a mistake when the girl pushes her chair back, smiles too hard at me, and winds her way through the empty tables to sit down across from me where I’m having lunch alone with a book.
     I was peeking at her between spoonfuls of soup, a thick, tepid cream of mushroom I had better hopes for, and she looked up and caught me staring. I was looking at her because she seemed pretty, at that distance, in an old-fashioned way, which is to say, the way girls looked when I went to high school. Long, straight, brown hair. Pretty in a plain way. Sweet-looking.
     But when she sits down and leans her elbows on the table, that smile of hers, which had been so sweet from across the room, is intimate and knowing in a way that smacks of crazy and spooks me.
      “Where will your soul spend eternity?”
     She says this and then tilts her head slightly, looking at me as if from my mouth will flow the wisdom of the ages, the faith of our fathers, the answer of answers. If God is in the details, I think but don’t say, the details must be stuck between my teeth.
     She’s staring at my mouth as if she will be able to see what I’m going to say before I say it, while it is still in my mouth.
     I’m not sure what to say.
     The names Kierkegaard and Bultmann and Reinhold Niebuhr run through my mind. It occurs to me to say that I will spend eternity riding through the universe on the crest of a Whiteheadian process-as-god juggernaut, much as a golden-skinned child might negotiate a surfboard over an ocean the color of emeralds under a cobalt blue sky.
     But I don’t say that.
     Instead I find myself mentally inventorying the items on the table: salt and pepper shakers that are a little greasy to the touch, a ketchup bottle apparently never opened, a bottle of mustard, not like the jars you have at home, but twin to the ketchup bottle in every respect (why do you never see those in the grocery store?), three sets of tableware tightly wound in paper napkins, packets of sugar and sweet-n-low in equal measure. My own half-finished plate of food is an augury that would probably tell my doctor more than a battery of CAT scans, EKGs, and barium enemas ever could. I still haven’t said anything, and I wonder for a moment if Nicholson Baker falls into similar fugue states when his mind wanders out to where the road forks three.
      “Where will your soul spend eternity?”
     Hmm. I’m reminded of a woman I met in an office where I worked for a while once a long time ago. She and I had made eye contact in the lunch area a few times. I was young then and couldn’t work up the nerve, but finally she took that slow walk across the lunchroom, all the while affecting a countenance that said, Yes, I know what you want but can’t ask for, so I’ll start it for you. She too sat down across from me and leaned provocatively on the table. After a couple of lunch hours like that, I finally got her to my house, and past the formalities of meeting my roommate, and into my bedroom. But when I reached for her, she pushed a small yellow book into my hands and began telling me about the power of chanting.
     Chanting?
      “If you chant every day, seven times a day, you can have anything you want,” she said. “I needed a new car so I chanted for it and then my father gave me his old car. Do you see?”
     No. I didn’t. I didn’t see at all. I could make out no causal connection between those obviously disparate events. Moreover, it seemed clear to me at that now distant, but very particular point in my life, that I didn’t even want to to see a connection between them. I didn’t even want to live in a world where such a connection, in fact, existed. In my mind’s eye, there was a chasm between cause and effect in her car story of such enormity that David Hume might very well have driven her father’s Buick through it, but I let her show me the page in the book where the chant started. And then she began to chant, rocking back and forth, and encouraging me with her eyes and hands to chant with her, duet style. Nam myoho renge kyo. Nam myoho renge kyo. We chanted. I don’t know what new something or other she may have been chanting for, but after thirty minutes or so, when her clothes still hadn’t fallen off, I found myself unsold on the power of chanting.
      “Where will your soul spend eternity?”
     I look up from the table. She’s not so pretty close up. Her eyes are a little too close together, and the skin on and around her nose is sort of red and rough looking, like a berry. Her hair could stand washing, and I can see some flakes of dandruff in the part and on her forehead.
     I can smell her too. I admonish myself for being a bath snob and venture I’m probably too fastidious for evangelism, at least as it is practiced in the all-you-can-eat buffet style dining room. Actually, she doesn’t smell that bad. There are some sweat stains on her khaki blouse which is sleeveless, and when she raises her arms to push back her hair, I see she didn’t shave her armpits today. Or yesterday. Or for a series of yesterdays that range into the past farther than I can read from here. I’m not necessarily turned off by this, you see, just–
      “Where will your soul spend eternity?”
     What? Spend eternity? Hmm. For a moment I reckon with the odd coincidence of the figures of speech that govern both time and money. We spend time, we spend money. We waste both. We try to save both. We count the seconds and we count the cents. I fold my money, the bills, into rectangular fourths, and store them in my front left pants pocket. Can one fold time? I remember a couple of science fiction books in which technology existed whereby space might be folded. One of them was called A Wrinkle in Time, which, now that I think about it, that title isn’t quite right. It was space that got folded or wrinkled in that book, not time, though I suppose A Wrinkle in Time is a better title than A Wrinkle in Space.
      “Where will your soul spend eternity?”
     By this point I’m getting a little ticked off since she’s asked me this like twenty times now. Couldn’t she give a person a moment to formulate an answer? Of course, I suppose she wouldn’t hear my answer anyway. She probably has a programmed response written by someone higher up in her church, maybe even a plea for donations or picture postcards of Jesus for sale. So I say, “In hell.” I look her dead in the eyes and say, “In hell. Teaching Sunday school. Yes, I’ll be teaching Sunday school in a very hot room in hell.”
     And I smile. It’s something a professor of mine used to say. Every time someone in class didn’t know who Caiphas was or what happened on the road to Emmaus or who climbed the sycamore the better to see Christ, he would roll his eyes and then kindly say, “That’s all right; it doesn’t matter; there’ll be plenty of time. Later,” and then he’d drop that teaching Sunday school in hell stuff on us. We always laughed because we knew he was kidding. We knew that we weren’t going to hell, that there was no hell, and his joke seemed to substantiate this. Who, after all, would joke about going to hell if there were, in fact, a hell to which one might actually go?
     Years later, of course, I realized that he would. Yes, good old Professor Krutch was certainly of the kind to make that joke and pass it off to us as irony, all the while fully certain that he would someday find himself in hell, teaching Sunday school. Maybe it was only that he hoped his afterworldly punishment would be so mild a yoke as continuing his present mission–teaching the facts of the Bible to folks who had no reason to know such stuff. Poetry, history, the life of the mind, the life of Christ, these might as well have been Sanskrit he was trying to pawn off on us, for all the relevance they had or the good they did us. His world was ideas and meaning; our worlds were stuff and no idea what meaning might mean.
      “Do you know where your soul will spend eternity?”
     Huh? Is this a different question? When she said “Where will your soul spend eternity?”, the implication, at least to me, was that my soul and I were the same thing. Asking it this way–Do you know where your soul will spend eternity–seems to suggest my “soul” might be different from my “me.” It is hard for me to imagine a me without a body–the ghost come out from the machine and, what? floating around somewhere? And here’s one of the deals: I’m guessing that in the soul world, heaven or whatever, no one is any taller than anyone else. I mean, part of who I am is being tall. How can I really be me without being tall? It’s like reincarnation. Unless I come back as me, what’s the point? I’m sure there’s a point, but the abstract notion that my life force will live on as somebody else is not exactly comforting, vis-a-vis the afterlife.
     On the other hand, if I’m not going to be me when I’m reincarnated, then who cares whether I come back as a cow or a housefly or a clam? If I were coming back as me, well, then I wouldn’t want to be a cow or any kind of animal really. I would want to be a person, but a better person, a more fun person. Come back as a rock star. Or maybe Robert Johnson. Could I be reincarnated into the past? Come back as Napoleon. No, as Mark Twain. No, no. He had a bad life, bad luck, all his people getting sick and dying. Oh yeah, as Robert Johnson. He sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads at midnight so he could be the best guitar player in the world. That would be interesting: meet the Devil and then play really good guitar until you die and are reincarnated as Lady Godiva or something. How would the Devil ever get his?
     I guess I’ve mixed up the mythology somewhere. But she’s gotten up and gone to another table where she’s asking an elderly lady where she will spend eternity. I suppose that at seventy or eighty or however old that lady is, one must be either intensely interested in or relatively indifferent to where one will spend eternity. The lady looks tired enough to spend eternity in bed.
     Actually, I like that idea too.
     Across the room another girl has met my eyes. She’s pretty, in the way that girls are pretty now, spiky hair, delicate nose ring, jeans low enough on her hips to suggest requisite shaving, but as she starts through the tables toward me, I bolt for the cash register like Dante toward the rear door of Hell.



About the author:
John Calvin Hughes has published fiction, poetry, and criticism in numerous periodicals, including Mississippi Review, Apostrophe, and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. He lives and works in Florida.

© 2011 Word Riot