PurgatoReality

Chapter X

Excerpted from the PurgatoReality Manual and User's Guide 2nd Edition, PurgatoReality Press, Copyright 15 Anno Purgatorium by the PurgatoReality Corporation. All rights reserved. Violators will be prosecuted. This means you.

Welcome to PurgatoReality!

The first thing you'll want to know, is that you are not in Hell – although it sure may seem like it.

Of course, this isn't Heaven, either.

PurgatoReality is sort of someplace between the two. Sort of a "holding tank", if you will. That may seem a bit confining; however, most people will find it enjoyable, once they get the hang of it. If they get the hang of it. Most of them, sadly, have stopped reading by now. Pity them. In short: PurgatoReality is what you think it is. Be careful, though. Both your conscious and subconscious thoughts are taken into account. Most people who do not read and understand this manual are in for quite a ride.

PurgatoReality Rocks!

Chapter X + 1

Dg was attempting to be profoundly despondent. Not that he properly understood how to despond, mind you. Under the circumstances, however, he was willing to give it a go.

He had made so many mental notes in the last several days that he made a further mental note not to make any more mental notes. His brain was so cluttered with mental sticky notes, he feared it would be to the extinction of most of his memories and analytical thought processes.

It was bad enough that he had died in the middle of a wonderful career. To add insult to injury, he'd found out that there really was a Purgatory: a waiting room, so to speak, before God's judgment was applied.

Only this wasn't his Dad's Purgatory. And it wasn't a room. It was a series of nested universes where, at any time, one could opt to manipulate their surroundings. It was PurgatoReality and, as it turned out, wasn't all that bad. Not all that good, either. It just depended on your ability to cope with numerous rules, silly or otherwise, which were, for lack of a better term, forced upon you. This, of course, made it more or less like working in Corporate America, except for the part where here, in PurgatoReality, anything you could think up could be brought into existence immediately.

Unfortunately for Dg, he had managed to somehow misplace his PurgatoReality Manual and User's Guide 2nd Edition before he had gotten past the point where the manual said most people stopped reading. Had he read further, he would have known that this was no place for a sense of humor. Especially the bent and twisted, hilarious brand of wacky humor Dg had been blessed with on Earth.

For Dg, tension and nervousness brought out the best (or, now, worst) of his derailed, yet salient, humor. His current name, for instance, was a direct result of his initial contact with the PurgatoReality Staff. He was seated in the "Registration Room" with some sort of alien which had introduced itself to him as "Mr. Bikklesnoz".

"Name?" the vaguely man-shaped being with a horrendously large nose asked him.

"Uh, er.. Doug"

"How do you spell that?" the being asked flatly, exuding a tired, bored look.

"Uh, well, the usual way..."

"Sir. May I remind you that this is PurgatoReality. Not just for your planet, not just for your planetary system. Indeed, this PurgatoReality exceeds the boundaries of even your own galaxy. There are, approximately, 5 quadrillion ways to spell the name 'Uherdoug'."

"Oh, but my name is Doug - not 'Uherdoug'."

"Then why did you say it was?"

"I, um, well, 'waking up dead' is rather nerve wracking, you know. I mean, to suddenly be propelled into a strange place is, well... I haven't had time to acclimate.."

"I see. Perhaps you'd like to fill out the form for a time extension, then, Sir," the being monotoned, as it pulled a sheaf of papers from its left nostril.

"Oh, uh, well, that might help..."

"Very well, sir," the alien began. He shuffled through the stack. He gently extracted a form, carefully placed it in front of him and licked his pencil rather thoughtfully. He then looked up at Dg.

"Name?"

"Oh, for... look we aren't getting anywhere this way, are we?"

"On the contrary. The entire Universe is constantly in motion, reaching speeds of..."

"Oh, bloody! Never mind all that. Doug. D-o-u-g," Dg blurted.

The being began writing.

"No, wait! Forget the time extension form - just fill out the original one."

"Sorry, sir. I've already got the "D" and the "o" written down. If you want to fill out the original form, we must now fill out the form to eradicate this 'Time Extension' form before continuing."

The being riffled through the sheaf which had, until recently, been neatly packed in his nasal cavity and pulled out yet another form, which he placed on the table and smoothed out.

"Name?"

"Look! I've told you my bloody name two bloody times now!"

"Yes. Well, if you're in a hurry, it might be well to just change your name to 'Do'"

"'Do'? Look, why not just make the 'o' into a 'g'. That sounds enough like 'Doug'. I have an aversion to vowels anyway."

"Oh! In that case we can save lots of time, Mr. Dg. We'll just forgo all the vowels on all these forms, then."

Two hours later, Dg left, wondering how someone like Aristophanes would have fared. He had been directed to the Office of Interim Employment, purportedly to enable him to find a job while he was waiting for The Judgment.

The sad thing was that if Dg had filled out the Time Extension form, he would have had time to acclimate to PurgatoReality and would have found out that anything he could think up would become reality for him. As it was, his brain was a tad bit jumbled and sort of making up its own reality as it went along. Unfortunately for his brain, there was also the current reality to acclimate to. This condition is well documented in the PurgatoReality Manual and User's Guide as "dipsychos" and is the leading cause of some really wild happenings in PurgatoReality.

He found the Office of Interim Employment easily enough, but then had to wait 20 minutes for the clerk to return from lunch. Dg thought it odd that one would take lunch at this time of day, until he realized that he had absolutely no idea what time of day it actually was. He peered around at the drab decor -- made all the more drab by its complete lack of interesting color. It reminded Dg of a black and white set from some Ed Wood film. Despite his reconnaissance, no timepiece could be found.

Dg leafed through an issue of Vast Space Magazine which featured some curvaceous model showing off her anti-gravity boots. The clerk arrived, just as Dg was considering a subscription. He did a double-take to make sure he wasn't imagining that the clerk looked an awful lot like Boris Karloff. With eyeglasses. He smelled alcohol. Maybe it was just cologne.

"May I be of assistance, sir?" the Boris double droned in a mostly unnerving Karloffy way.

Dg grimaced and handed the papers to him. Boris wavered unsteadily as he pored over the paperwork.

"Not fond of vowels, eh?" he laughed insidiously. "Walk this way..."

Once inside, Dg chose a chair obviously intended for customers; due in part to the largish sign pointing to it and specifying 'For Customers Only'. The tiny office was cramped and smelled of cigar smoke. A haze could be seen, getting thicker as it rose until it almost obscured the tiny, bare, incandescent light bulb hanging impossibly close to the ceiling.

"Nice digs, Boris."

Boris glanced up, over his bifocals, making a barely quizzical moan, then furrowed his brow, reading over the sheets with an occasional 'Tsk, tsk'. Finally, he took off the glasses, rubbed his eyes and looked at Dg with half closed lids.

"So, Mr. Dg. Exactly what sort of job are you looking for, in general?"

Somewhere between 'exactly' and 'in general', Dg's brain blanked out. He stammered something about an office accounting position. Dg's central nervous system, despite being dead, was exceedingly overactive at this point: the perfect trigger for his oddball sense of humor. Accordingly (and unfortunately) he then added,

"… and I want a brain the size of a planet, so I don't have to really work at it."

Dg had been looking at the ground, trying to envision what he wanted. He looked up to find Boris, reclining in his chair, nose up in the air, snoring loudly.

"Boris? Hallo?"

Boris started from his nap, looking surprised. He scowled at Dg.

"You're still here? I already processed your papers. You can leave."

"I, er, I'm not sure where to go..."

Boris moved some papers on his desktop, uncovering a large red button. Just before pounding on it, Boris waved and said, "Off with you now, bloody peasant!"

Chapter X + 2

Dg's next memory was that of being seated in a very comfortable office chair. To his utter surprise, though, there was no office. Or, more correctly, there were no office walls. Or building. He seemed to be floating in space: a panoramic backdrop of black with tiny pinpoints of light here and there. Also, an occasional nebulous haze. He sat bolt upright in the chair, terrified. This caused him to kick something underfoot. He leaned over, feeling very giddy, to see the bottom of a desk. A phone started ringing on the other side of the desk, where, he supposed, something very much resembling the desk's top was. Looking between the desk and the chair, Dg could see a small clod of dirt with, perhaps, a pebble or two alongside a single blade of grass. He planted one foot on the clod of dirt, which was all that would fit, and stood up. Dizziness washed over him and the next thing he knew, he was sprawled over the top of the desk. He grabbed the phone, trying to lift his face off the desk in order to actually speak.

"Err oh?" he mumbled. It was Boris.

"Yas, old chap. I hope all is to your liking. A rather strange request, you know. An office job on a planet the size of a brain. Ah, well. I'll call back in a week, see if you want to change to something more, er, traditional. Good day!"

"nnnnngggggg" was all Dg could manage. The revolution of his desk and chair and, for lack of a more appropriate term, planet were making normal movement difficult. He jammed the phone into its cradle, as best as he could under the circumstances, and screamed. Not that he expected anyone to hear him, or help. He just felt it more or less the proper thing to do. He pushed himself upwards, briefly noting that he had 390 emails waiting on his computer. He shoved as hard as he could and was gratified, somewhat, to find that he was gently slammed back into his chair. He decided then that the bloody emails and phone calls could wait, whether that meant losing his new job or not. Getting fired was, right now, the most hopeful thing he could imagine.

So it was, with four days left of the week (or was it only two days, he mused - perhaps he had weekends off?) that Dg found himself still seated, still revolving under the influence of his brain-sized planet's gravity, still not answering his emails nor the phone. It was at this point that Dg was trying to remember how to despond. Giving up on that, he decided to scan the heavens for any larger inhabitable planets. After a few moments, he fancied he could see a tiny silver object streaking towards his location. He monitored its progress and decided it might just be his cab ride home from the office.

A rather boring, seeming multitude of hours later, the object was close enough to see clearly. It appeared to be something of a flying micro bus without wheels. Oddly, rather than moving in a way one would expect a vehicle speeding through space to move (front always in front, and so on) this one slowly revolved around its own Y axis. One of the two occupants seemed to be wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt. The other, smaller one, a tuxedo. At this point, Dg's brain refused adamantly to process any further information. He fully expected a whale and a bowl of petunias to appear, both uttering "Not again!" before disappearing into the depths of this spacious void. At least Douglas Adams' galaxy had the good sense to be fiction...

He idly noticed that the vessel was slowing on sort of a sweeping arc towards his office-planet. Some planet, he thought. It doesn't even have a decent Fish and Chips restaurant. Out of sheer boredom, he began to recount every restaurant visit he had ever made in his entire life.

Dg's reverie was broken sometime later to a loud beeping sound. The micro bus spaceship had arrived and the little man in the tuxedo was pounding on the horn, trying to get his attention. The tie-dye garbed hippie opened his door and leaned out, almost falling.

"Whoa! Hey, man! How ya doin?"

The little man in the tux slapped the hippie and told him to close the door. Dg at that point noticed the little man's beak. As the mini bus pivoted slowly around, Dg wondered why in the universe the little man was dressed up as a penguin. He assumed it was for a costume party he hadn't been invited to. When the little man opened the door and leaned out, Dg's brain caught up with the fact that this was, in fact, merely a penguin.

"I was just wondering," the penguin said, "Could we trouble you for the use of your phone?"

Chapter X + 3

The penguin-like alien introduced itself with the highly untenable name of "Waddles". To say that he was ecstatic at having found Dg and his office-world was an understatement. After making his phone call, he had asked Dg very politely if he minded very much if his entire planet were destroyed.

"Ah... well, it isn't really mine, so to speak," Dg had started.

"Look, either you give your permission or I will wage war on your pathetically human-brain sized lump of dirt."

"Right-o," was all that Dg could manage. He quickly determined that he was lacking in any suitable frame of reference with respect to penguin invasions of miniscule planets. He assumed Boris would be upset. That fact, however, only furthered his willingness to surrender to the dubiously marauding Waddles and his as-yet mostly silent partner. Waddles began fiddling around with several large electronic circuit boards he had extracted from Dg's desktop computer. The rather morose looking human in the tie-dyed t-shirt finally decided to introduce himself.

"Heeey! Name's Chase, man. Far out! Thanks for lending a hand, dude!"

"Charmed. I'm Doug. Or as the denizens of this forsaken universe would have it... Dg."

"Oh, hey, I dig 'Dg', Doug. You wouldn't happen to have any peanut butter handy... ?"

The mention of food reminded Dg of another reason to call this planet quits. It seemed days since he had eaten, probably because it had been. The mention of peanut butter – while not high on Dg's list of comestibles – should still have started the expected Pavlovian saliva response. It didn't.

"Uh, er, no. Sorry. Not my favorite for luncheon, I'm afraid. Not that I actually have any food at all on this horrid dirt clod of an office-planet."

"No problem, dude. But that answers my question about the jellybeans, too, I guess." Chase somehow managed to crawl back into his seat. "I'll just mellow out in here," he said to no one in particular.

Waddles was, by now, twittering in what was either his native language, or else a close approximation of Russian curse words. He was taking the circuit board out of a cellphone he found in one of the drawers, and was attempting to hook it into the computer's graphics card.

While waiting, Dg decided to sit down again. As he struggled to draw the chair away from the desk, he found that, by jumping slightly, he could push off from the planet and sort of go into a slow orbit. After the third revolution, he noted that it probably would have been much more comfortable if he had sat down, first. As it was, the chair was actually in orbit, with he, himself, clutching the back of it tightly so as not to go flying off, tangentially speaking. After the tenth time around, an aggravated Waddles grabbed the chair and scooted it back under the desk, causing Dg's head to smack solidly against the faux wood-grain.

"We really have little time for rotational antics, Dg. Perhaps you could assist me with removing the glass from the front of this Cathode Ray Tube computer monitor?"

Dg didn't like the sound of that. He knew enough about monitors and TVs to know that the CRT could hold a lethal electrical charge. Waddles assured him that cutting out the square of glass from the front would not be a problem. Dg countered that the CRT would implode due to the vacuum inside the CRT. Waddles rejoined with a mathematical explanation which made Dg's head spin. Seeing this, Waddles took a different approach.

"In short, human: there would have to be a significant atmospheric pressure difference between the vacuum inside this tube and the vacuum outside of it. There isn't."

Aghast, Dg realized something that hadn't struck him as of yet: Due in large part to the fact that there wasn't anything much to breathe, he wasn't breathing.

For some reason, despite already knowing he was dead, that revelation caused him to start making gasping motions. Waddles peered intently at him for a few seconds, then threw his flippers up and rolled his eyes.

"Perfect example of dipsychos," he muttered. Then he continued, "the conflict arising from knowing you're dead but not understanding that you don't need to breathe because you are dead... Oh, shut up, you!"

This last was directed at Chase, who started moaning and whimpering at the reminder that he, too, for all intents and purposes, was dead.

"We can't pee, either, bro," sobbed Chase.

Waddles began twittering in earnest and finally grabbed two items from a desk drawer. He handed them to Dg.

"I suppose you'll also have missed the fact that we've been communicating telepathically?"

"Well, er, yes, as a matter of fact, I had," Dg said – or, rather, thought. "You see, this being dead bit has me somewhat off-kilter. I don't really feel dead. I mean, I did spend a rather significant portion of my life being, well, alive. And so, many of the things I did then, I can't do now, even though other things can be done, which, during my alive life, were considered to be patently impossible for those who were found to be dead-dead. So this sort of being alive-dead, or perhaps, dead-alive..."

Waddles waited for the human's rambling to trail off, then clicked his beak, getting Dg's attention once more.

"Take this sharp, pointy metal thing and put it on the glass right here. Then take this lumpy, heavy, metal thing and make like a human and bang the metal pieces together. And don't hit my flipper!"

In one stroke, the face of the CRT separated neatly from the rest of the CRT enclosure. The front piece moved away with some speed and then settled into orbit. Satisfied, Waddles mounted the CRT to the rear of his space-worthy micro bus. He fastened the tilt-and-swivel base to the back and attached four lengths of printer cable to the left, right, top and bottom of the monitor so that pulling any cable tilted the monitor and effected a sort of aiming mechanism. He ran the cables forward to his seat.

Next, he mounted the desk below the frame of the bus. Slowly, the entire conglomeration began looking somewhat less like a micro-bus shaped space ship and more like a wad of space debris.

"Not that I'm keen to stay a moment longer on this dirt-clod, but I do feel compelled to ask: what exactly are you planning to do next," Dg asked without much hope of a reasonable answer.

"Well," Waddles said, as patiently as possible. "We could just hang out, waiting for Judgment day to come; which, by the way, currently isn't..."

"Oh?"

"Yes," Waddles continued, "because there seems to be a huge problem here in all the nested universes of PurgatoReality. To wit: everything is working the way it shouldn't and nothing isn't working the way it should."

"Ah. Well. Pity, that," Dg stammered.

"Yes. So I think, perhaps, a better choice would be for us to solve the huge problem, become heroes and, as well, manage to get Judgment Day back on track, so we can all finally leave this horrendous nightmare."

"Right-o," said Dg. "And, of course, our flying amalgamation of your spaceship and the items formerly residing on my clod of a planet will assist us in this quest how, exactly?"

"I have found that one can never have too much of anything in this warped, twisted universe. We can either make use of these items, or, possibly, sell them for p-cash on p-bay."

Waddles hooked the chair to the desk, using the last of the duct tape and a few more printer cables from another desk drawer. He told Dg to come aboard, stuffing the rest of the computer and assorted junk into the drawers of the desk.

Chase had been watching Waddles work. It seemed to him that, despite Waddles' lack of hands and fingers, he was able to manipulate objects – even tiny ones – as well as any human. While he had seen many cartoons where animals were able to utilize hammers and pistols, for instance, when he saw it in this reality, it had a sort of alarming, macabre effect.

Waddles seemed to read his mind.

"No, it's not magic. My flippers have an array of about 500 suckers each – too small to see without magnification – which I use to grab onto items. I understand how odd it must be. When I learned of fingers and hands, I couldn't possibly imagine how they worked, even though I'd seen many a cartoon on my planet where the characters managed all sorts of feats with a mere ten digits."

Waddles glanced over his handiwork, making sure he hadn't overlooked anything.

"Well. This is better than I'd hoped! Now all we have to do is locate a website that has a video of some Fellini films."

Neither Dg nor Chase fully understood the alien's desire to watch Italian films at just that point in time. However, before either could think of a way to ask, Waddles chattered with delight.

"La Dolce Vita !"

Waddles clicked the link. The movie began. Electrons began shooting from the CRT. Instead of hitting the now-removed front plate of glass, however, the electrons poured out faster and faster into space. As Waddles had calculated, this erratic stream of Fellini-inspired electrons was enough to propel their duct taped craft away from the brain-sized planet at high speed, toward the waiting stars.