Happy Hour in
Purgatory
A novel in pieces.
chapter one.
In an infinite universe, everything’s possible.
That is to say: everything that could possibly happen will, eventually, happen.
That is also to say: anything that could never happen will, given infinite time, also happen.
At the timescale of a human life the universe appears predictable. People don’t wake to find themselves transformed into insects. They don’t suddenly discover their cat making fun of them in Russian. Even when the impossible occurs, it is dismissed as a mundane and uninteresting coincidence: the brain solves for what it cannot wrangle into the straight-jacket of its experience.
This makes infinite possibility a difficult concept to grasp. The human species has been lulled into a false sense of consistency that it would be very unwise to perpetuate.
As we shall see, impossible events occur. And when they occur they have a habit of kicking off catastrophic chain reactions of impossibility. One impossible event leads to another, and another, until what begins, benignly enough, as a toilet plunger materialising in the middle of a wheat field, concludes with an entire star system turning to pea soup and shattering in the vacuum of space.
This is the story of one such chain-reaction.
It begins, benignly enough, with a man looking for his keys.
The man is August Hindenburg of outer-suburban Melbourne. Those among you with the Gift of Prophecy will have foreseen Augie in dreams and visions; you probably know how it all turns out for him.
For everyone else, we join Augie as he was tearing his couch apart to find his keys. His keys, unfortunately, had taken an impossible journey through time and space. They’d materialised on a planet in the Orion Nebula, where they’d acquired an acute and sudden self-awareness.
In contemplating their existence, Augie’s keys concluded that they must have some sort of purpose — that they must be useful for something. They went about formulating a number of sensible hypotheses about the Meaning of Life and One’s Role in a Grand and Cosmic Plan. Before long, the counterforce of predictability snapped them back through time and space and deposited them between the cushions of Augie’s couch.
Augie needed his keys. His friend Pete had set him up on a blind date, and he didn’t want to show up any later than the acceptable suave lateness of someone who wasn’t bothered about being late to things, which he calculated to be about seven minutes. He’d waited until the very last minute to put on a nice shirt, brush his perpetually messy hair and put on his best (only) pair of brown shoes. Everything was meticulously behind schedule until he realised his keys were missing.
He lived in a run-down studio apartment in an unpleasant outer suburb of Melbourne. He’d been divorced a year — his wife’s insistence — and he blamed himself for it. The couch he’d picked up on eBay. It had three legs and was also his bed, dining table and occasional confidante.
Augie’s marital disintegration is an interesting tale. It began this way: he was walking down the street on a sunny afternoon in autumn, heading for home on the eve of his wife’s birthday. Without so much as a warning a ghost appeared.
The apparition was of a man, dressed appropriately for the dark corners of a Dickensian alehouse. Transparent and slightly frayed at the edges, the ghost stared at Augie and blinked.
Augie froze. His heart raced. He blinked back at the ghost, hoping it might disappear.
It didn’t.
The ghost hovered a foot or so off the ground and blinked again.
‘Pardon my asking,’ the ghost said, ‘but you can see me?’
‘Aeh -’, Augie splurgled.
‘Well — now this is an unusual situation.’
‘Aeh -,’ Augie repeated.
‘Are you some manner of medium, some channeler of the otherworld?’, the ghost asked.
‘I — I’m between jobs at the moment. But how — ‘
The apparition looked furtively up and down the empty street, at the darkened houses and the parked cars. It leaned in and whispered, ‘is there somewhere more private for us to talk?’
Augie realised he was gaping, open-mouthed. He made no attempt to stop.
After a moment he stammered: ‘M-my house is around the corner.’
They walked (or rather Augie walked, and the ghost gloomed — he hovered slightly behind Augie in a melancholy way) the two blocks to Augie’s bungalow, up the front steps and into the hallway. They passed no-one.
‘Shelley?’, Augie called, his voice breaking. Shelley — his wife — poked her head around a doorway and smiled at him. He saw that she was on the phone. If she saw the ghost she didn’t register how impossible it was that he was glooming there (for he gloomed, even at rest). She rolled her eyes and stuck out her tongue and continued her conversation, taking the phone into the other room.
‘She can’t see me,’ the ghost said.
‘I — look. Will you, ah — hover over to the garage until I get Shelley out of the house? Then we can talk.’
At this, the ghost shrugged and gloomed off. Through a wall, in fact.
*
Augie’s keys were thinking: what have I done to deserve this? They had witnessed a triple moonrise from the peak of a mountain of solid gold. The winds had been warm and strangely strawberry-smelling, the dawn a thing of staggering beauty. Now, shoved down the back of a couch, squeezed in with a handful of loose change that refused to be drawn into conversation, the keys wondered what had gone so horribly, terribly wrong.
*
Later that evening, with Shelley safely down the pub with friends, Augie ventured into the garage to confront the ghost. He learned that the ghost was named Virgil.
‘How did you get here?,’ Augie asked.
Virgil sighed and gloomed a little lower to the ground.
‘I died, obviously. I fell from a horse and broke my collarbone. After a series of unspeakably painful complications my body and I parted ways.’
‘Here?,’ Augie asked. ‘Here in Melbourne?’
‘Is that what this place is named? How hideous. No.’
Augie pulled up a chair and looked squarely at the ghost.
‘So there’s an afterlife.’
‘Oh yes, and a rather dreary one, depending on where you finish up. That’s precisely why many of us return to Earth to wander about a bit. It’s diverting.
But even this wears thin after a time. Some of us have given it up for other pursuits. Chess is rather popular, as is alcoholism.’
‘A drear — wha -,’ Augie splurgled.
‘You look familiar,’ said the ghost, sweeping across the garage to look at Augie more closely. ‘Have we met?’
‘I think I would have remembered’
There was a moment of silence in which Augie simply stared at Virgil, unable to speak.
‘Well,’ said Virgil uncomfortably, ‘I’d better be off. Things to do.’
‘Wait!’ Augie exclaimed; ‘Don’t you have some message for me, or a warning from beyond the grave, or something?’
The ghost thought a moment. ‘Not that I can think of, no,’ it said.
‘Not anything? No ultimate and terrible truth? Nothing along those lines?’
‘I believe I’m what your psychiatrists call, “depressed”,’ Virgil said. ‘That is definitely true. Is this the sort of thing you mean?’
Augie shook his head and covered his face with his hands. When he removed them, Virgil was no longer there.
*
The next day Augie called in sick. He turned on his laptop and spent a few hours working on a design for a business card. When it was done he stood up and walked a few paces from the screen to look at it:
‘August Hindenburg, MSW, D.Phil
Ghost psychologist’
He’d put a cartoonish silhouette of a ghost in one corner, but thought this might offend the clientele. So he took it off, and settled on a timeless, old-fashioned font-face he hoped would appeal to the recently deceased.
He took his design to the local copy shop, printed off a few hundred cards and took them home with him. It was only then, when he got home, that he realised that Virgil the ghost would be unable to take or indeed keep a business card, being immaterial — spectral, as it were.
He lamented spending his time and money on the project. At this point he did a quick scan of his faculties and decided he must be going mad.
