Even if you were Lord Buddha’s personal dog—as I had once been—you still had to fill out paperwork for requests for interviews with him. He was indeed a celebrity; yet always very clerical in the first place; and never prone to exercising exceptionalism in any way, shape or form. So even though I could go right up to him and lick his ankles (which he hated, but don’t tell anyone that, it would ruin his reputation) I still had to fill out reams of paperwork to request the enlightenment interview.
Since AI was banned in heaven, there were still angels and people staffing the desks in key departments. The Ladyclerk at the Enlightenment Desk was a kindly and elderly woman; and even though the line was long (it stretched the entire length and breadth of the whole cosmos) when I showed her my Buddha Support Team dog tag she let me step in at the front.
Then she handed me a big ol’ stack of paper.
I stared at the forms to try and understand them.
REASON FOR VISIT said the first section.
I thought there would be a box that said “Was his dog”— but no.
“Attain Enlightenment” was there however, but there wasn’t just a single box for Attain Enlightenment.
There were literally hundreds of enlightenments listed. Furthermore, every one had adjectives, like the document had been infected by them. As though someone had picked up a bottle of adjectives at at Vēdarhöm (the marketplace of words) and then spilled it all over the forms.
“What the fuck,” I said, taken aback.
The Ladyclerk at the desk frowned. “Now, now,” she said, tsking. “This is a visitor queue. We don’t use language of that kind here.”
I apologized. “It’s just that there are so many kinds of enlightenment. Which one to choose?”
“Yes,” agreed the Ladyclerk. “After the Lord Buddha attained enlightenment he realized that it was rather more nuanced than expected. Enlightenment is not just one thing, you see. It is all things. And he decided we should be clearer about its nature. More accurate, you know. And because attaining enlightenment is so hard—after all, he had to go all the way through hell to attain it—“
“Don’t I know it,” I interrupted, stopping her with a wave of my paw. “I was there.”
“Oh My Gah. You’re Flaubert,” she said, suddenly looking much more closely at me. Her eyeballs were wide in amazement.
“Yes. I am Flaubert.”
“You have an extra form,” she said, handing me yet another sheet of paper.
“An extra form?”
“Yes. Lord Buddha always wants full stats on those closest to Him, since he has so little time to talk to them otherwise.”
