High Hopes

Illustration: to be viewed while listening to Frank Sinatra’s “High hopes.”

Lucille found Jesus and Luke in a small cafe’ near the great pyramid.

At that time it still had a fair amount of its exterior marble, which made it look quite different that it does in modern times: polished and slick, without much evidence of the massive underlying bricks it was constructed of. Street cafés had clustered around it because it was then, as always, an object for tourists to gawk at more than a sacred tomb, or a giant device for sharpening razor blades. In those days— as still today—it was believed to have a homeopathic power, and so people would gather bits off the base and sprinkle them on their breakfast oats on the theory that pyramid powder would… well, make your poop look more like pyramids or something. I don’t get this stuff.

In any event, Lucille was not out on an authorized excursion from hell for any sanctioned or legitimate purposes: such as, to seduce poor human souls and condemn them to eternal hellfire. Nope. She was allowed to do that any old time (subject to completing the paperwork, which in her case was minimal) but to just check out unannounced for a little recreational shoplifting or to torment small animals, for example—well, Satan would have blown his top.

Not that that ever stopped Lucy, mind you. She was an independent fallen soul.

The whole point of her AWOL excursion from hell, as she later told it to me, was to find this hunk Jesus she’d met a few weeks earlier. After she got back to hell she couldn’t get the boy off her mind, no matter how many deserving sinners she stuck pitchforks into.

Even if He was God.

Finally she saw, in a moment of greater clarity, that she was actually pitchforking her victims maliciously, without the objective emotional distance that is oh, so important when you’re a credentialed professional torturer.

She was angry. That much she saw.

And she began to see that it was because she had become obsessively fixated on something she could not have.