Bilgewater in Heaven.rtf 08.03.

23 10:35 PM

Bilgewater In Heaven
By Guy Duperreault

Tom cat Bilgewater had arisen on a bright and cheerful morning feeling
depressed, in part because of temperament, in part because of his dislike of his name,
in part because his nonagenarian owner was deaf, but mostly because he'd been
subjected to listening to Alfred's horrible singing almost every morning for nine years.
Bilgewater had long since stopped trying to out caterwaul him.
For some reason Alfred's singing was beyond horrible this particularly bright
and cheerful morning and had just the edge to supplant the last remaining images
Bilgewater had kept in his mind of plump singing birds and mewling she-cats. He
leapt, head first, from the second story eave of his house in a desperate, last ditch and
melodramatic attempt to escape Alfred's flagellating ululations.
Unfortunately for one of his nine lives, and despite his conscious intent,
Bilgewater's body righted itself as it always did and he landed feet first. Fortunately for
Bilgewater and his other eight lives he suffered only a broken right front leg.
Unfortunately for his ninety-seven year old owner, Grandma Bedlam, he had landed
on her shoulder. His weight snapped her clavicle and knocked her face first into her
lovingly tended rose bushes, which scratched her face and hands and arms and tore
her dress. Fortunately for Grandma Bedlam her head bounced off a large ornamental
rock which, while it knocked several minutes of consciousness from her and gave her
a large goose egg and mild headache, completely restored the hearing she had lost
when hit by a dump truck the day before her seventy-first birthday. Unfortunately for
her, the first thing she heard since the dump truck's horn was her neighbour's nerve-
jangling singing accompanied by the almost as jarring notes of tom's howling which,
combined with the blood that had seeped into her eyes from the scratches on her face,
convinced her that she had died and gone to Hell. The shock of that realization
brought on a massive heart attack from which she did, in fact, die.
Since Grandma Bedlam was completely free of sin, except for her
overwhelming pride in being a good Catholic, she went straight to Heaven, bypassing
both St. Peter and the Pearly Gates. She was eternally, but mildly, disappointed at not
having seen either of them after all she had heard about them. Unfortunately, before
getting there, she had become convinced that her pride in being a good Christian must
have been her sinning downfall and so spent her eternity in Heaven blasting everyone
who smiled at her — and everyone in Heaven smiled — with "You can't fool me! I
know that you're Satan in disguise so go away and leave me alone!"
Under her breath Bedlam muttered "And I thought fire and brimstone would
have been bad! Now I know that Hell is, truly, being put in the simulacrum of Heaven
with the full knowledge that it isn't! Yup, that is Hell indeed." But she didn't let that get
her spirit down as the years waxed eterne. Instead she took great, even stoic pride in
knowing that the degree of this torment indicated the level of respect held her by
Satan. "This is my Hell, and I'm damned proud of it!" became her nightly prayer.
As for Bilgewater, after his unsuccessful, bone-shattering plunge, he had
crawled, in great pain, over to the broken and bloodied body of his Bedlam, where he
saw, very clearly, that she was dead. He had killed her. With his broken heart and

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broken leg, Bilgewater yowled as he had never done before. When he stopped he
gave his beloved Bedlam one last look, then a quick lick and a gentle nuzzle against
her neck and ear.
Bilgewater assessed his situation. He realized that, if this was an example of a
cat trying to commit suicide, he would need nine more tries before succeeding — the
thought of which he found odious. He decided that escape was the only option, and
so the battered and forlorn cat three-leggedly limped and dragged himself until after
dusk, when he fell, exhausted and many miles away, at the stoop of a small and rather
disgruntled looking Buddhist monastery which was hiding behind a shaggy hedge and
a cracked and weed filled tarmac parking lot. He fell into an immediate and profound
sleep.
Sometime after midnight an unenlightened monk from the monastery, who was
wandering around dazed as usual because of his chronic insomnia, stepped on
Bilgewater and broke his other front leg. Bilgewater's caterwauling startled the monk
into the here and now for the first time in many months. The level of horror he felt
when he mistakenly concluded that he had broken two of the cat's legs was a
significant measure of how far he had yet to go as a Buddhist, despite his fifteen
committed, self-mortifying, effort-filled and celebrated celibate years. So it came to
pass that, against the strenuous protestations of the abbot who tersely cited one vague
catastrophe after another, the unenlightened monk took Bilgewater in, set his legs and
brought him back to health.
He couldn't quite explain it, and at first was unaware of it himself, but during the
first few months of mollycoddling the mouser, something within the unenlightened
monk's heart and soul shifted. The first noticed sign of change was that he no longer
suffered from insomnia, although he did not link that blessed change with having taken
on Bilgewater. When he did become aware that he no longer fruitlessly paced the
night he ascribed the change to an abatement he felt in the omnipresent feelings of
unease and panic at being unenlightened, and not to having been given someone's
pussy to succour.
As for Bilgewater, he was so grateful, not just for being given succour but for the
peace and quiet he experienced in the monastery with both the enlightened and
unenlightened monks, that after a period of detached mourning for his Grandma
Bedlam he became a monk himself in an expression of gratitude and joy. To
everyone's surprise he was mostly successful at being both celibate and vegetarian,
and it was with great pleasure that the abbot named him Enlightened Tom Cat, despite
his reputation for laconic communication in a religious organization noted for terse
personal instruction. Enlightened Tom Cat was quickly abbreviated by the rest of the
monks to ETC to accord with their perception of the abbot’s predilection for terse
verbiage and secret web-surfing. To no one's surprise this three letter acronym
annoyed the abbot, who found TLA's to be an abuse of language, despite his in-the-
closet surfing.
At ETC's recognition ceremony the unenlightened monk's distress at the abbot’s
claiming he could discern that a mere cat was or was not enlightened nearly drove him
mad. "How is it possible for you to determine that of even a humble tinker or tailor, let
alone for a creature which can at most meow?" the unenlightened monk ached to ask
the master. But he did not, frightened that it would show his lack of enlightenment.

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And yet, when he watched that damn tom of his — yes, he had come to see the tom as
being his despite his discipline to renounce materialism and feelings of
possessiveness — he too could see that there was something about that damned —
blessed? — ETC which reminded him of the abbot. Maybe, he thought, it was just that
neither one answered when spoken to. "Damn, damn, damn!" he chanted to the statue
of the smiling Buddha, who quietly watched over his bed, seeming to find funny his
quintessential failure in a way which inexplicably gave him heart enough to keep up
the good fight of fleeing the cycle of life and death's false entrances and exits.
ETC lived to the ripe old age of eighteen, and would have lived longer had he
not developed the habit of sleeping in the bed of his overweight and unenlightened
saviour, because....

One dark and blustery night, after several years of having listened to stage-
whispered cat calls and jibes which compared his lack of enlightenment with that of
ETC's and his expanding girth, the despairing monk decided that his enlightenment
must be hidden in the base, bodily mire of the earth and not in the purity of either the
diamond sutra or Buddha's teachings. "Would not this explain both my inability to stop
gaining weight, while eating the monastery's meagre meals, and also my apparent
incapability to experience enlightenment?" he asked himself desperately. When he
apprised his master of his thoughts, his master assured him that this was not unheard
of. "I take it," the abbot said, "you are referring to the master of the eighteenth century
who, after despairing of ever achieving enlightenment, left the monastery and became
enlightened upon his first experience of coitus with a common hooker?"
"Yes, master," he answered with his head bowed, "that is the story."
"I see," the master moved his head with what the unenlightened monk took to be
a sagacious nod. Excited by such an unusually generous reaction from his master, the
unenlightened monk waited with vainly bated breath for other sagacious words or
salubrious bodily communications.
The master, whose mind was tumbling his thoughts like a confectioner her dull
jellybeans, kept his thoughts to himself. Specifically he did not share with his inept
adept that he was himself dubious about the veracity of such stories, and that he was
even more sceptical of the efficacy of such an approach to enlightenment. But who
was he, his thinking rumbled, to say what is or is not the personal path of anyone's
individual enlightenment? Why, I'm a Zen Buddhist, he answered himself, and an
abbot to boot. So what?! he retorted. And so his mind seesawed, oblivious to
anything but the sound of his thoughts jostling inside the drum of his shorn pate.
After many minutes of silence, the unenlightened monk sighed, and pushed
himself with a heavy heart to his feet. He returned to his cell. "What did he mean?" he
posed the wall behind the smiling Buddha, preferring, this time, the wall's silence to
that of the Buddha's smarmy, smirky, self-possessed, surety. The lack of direction from
the master had plunked him into a mental quarry within which he scurried to find the
one metaphysical stone under which his enlightenment lay hid, hidden and blithely
communing, he was sure, with the worms, bugs, and slugs. He did not know whether
the master's reticence was a sign for him to seek enlightenment within the vicissitudes
of life or to continue his search within the monastery's sanct erudition. So, with the
wind and rain buffeting the windows and the Buddha silently laughing at him in time to

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ETC meditatively purring from the comfort of his cat cushion, the unenlightened monk
plopped himself down to meditate on his situation in order to clarify the meaning of the
abbot’s nodded "I see."
The unenlightened monk's so-called meditation began with his usual inability to
not follow his thoughts, which ineradicably and inexorably formed an unending,
unwanted and unbroken train crowded with brightly clad ideas and hale bugbears,
naked, which smiled lasciviously. But this time, for the first time in his life, his mental
babbling was interrupted by an uncomfortable flash of searing white light. The white
flash fluttered into waves and then the waves of white broke up like spindrift and blew
into droplets which, when they hit the ground, splashed into full spectrum bursts of
scintillae which whirled around, forming themselves into the characters of a Japanese
parable which he had fearfully pushed from his mind many years ago. The galaxy of
glowing lights that formed the parable which filled his inner eye was so bright that he
blinked and squinted his physical eyelids. He was aghast when, after his inner eye
had adjusted itself to the intensity of the lights, he could see that the brilliance came
from what looked like a Japanese Las Vegas on steroids. Each of the parable's
Japanese characters were comprised of enough tiny multi-hued neon lights to light up
a mile high casino a mile long. Unlike the hope he found in the image of the monk
groaning joyously inside the hot and noisy embrace of a zealous prostitute's luscious
thighs, this one filled him with a dread heavier than the thought of Death creeping up
in fog on cat feet to his unsecured door.
This is what he read across the sky:
One day Baso, disciple of Ejo, the Chinese master, was asked by the master
why he spent so much time meditating.
Baso: "To Become a Buddha."
The master lifted a brick and began rubbing it very hard.
It was now Baso's turn to ask a question: "Why," he asked, "do you rub
that brick?"
"To make a mirror."
"But surely," protested Baso, "no amount of polishing will change a brick
into a mirror."
"Just so," the master said: "no amount of cross-legged sitting will turn you
into a Buddha."
All the lights began to pulse in unison, in a rhythmic double beat which terrified him.
The unenlightened monk flushed with recognition, and began to sweat with foul, fear
imbued, profusion. The lights were in tune with his panicked heart's increasing beat.
In what seemed like an eternity the lights began to pop one at a time, with the
distinctive sound of a cheap champagne's plastic cork. Now in the blackness he could
hear the ominous breath of some omnivorous beast stalking him. He jumped up, out
of his vision and into his cell, to discover that what he had been hearing was his own
rasping panting. He sopped his forehead with a sleeve as he looked around. ETC
was still purring. The Buddha was still smugly smirking. He began to pace, and by
long habit designated it moving meditation.
What had so distressed him when he'd first read that parable, in black and white
— and even more so now that he'd seen it in colour — was, how long had Baso been
sitting cross-legged and failing, and how was it that the master knew that Baso was

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just cross-legged sitting? "How," the unenlightened monk moaned to himself, "do I
know whether or not I have been vainly sitting with my legs crossed?"
The structure of this terrifying image convinced him without doubt that he had to
seek his enlightenment in those defiled and polluted city streets which existed just
outside of the spiritually pristine monastery's unkempt easements. "Yes," he argued at
himself, "I know that the abbot would tell me that such dream-images are a delusion no
different than those found in the material universe, except in being even more
appealing than real life. But just look at the humour in it! Here I am, seeking
enlightenment and just when I begin to think that my enlightenment might be in the
dirty, so-called 'real' world, that's the time when I just happen to see a long forgotten
parable of a man failing to achieve it with meditation brightly lit up in the neon image of
a city whose entire existence is bound to pelf and narcissism!" He unhappily
concluded that a no more apt metaphor could be imagined, and then cursed his
existence to the implacable, ever grinning Buddha above him.
So, in a pure act of base enlightenment-desperation — or perhaps it was only a
base act of pure enlightenment-desperation, the two acts being, to the unenlightened,
hard to distinguish — the unenlightened monk left purring the meditating ETC and
smiling the mute Buddha when he snuck out into the stormy night. The first place he
furtively entered was a run-down and dirty all-you-can-eat and drink rib place where
he ate eight pounds of pig ribs and drank four pints of pale ale locally brewed with
pride to some foreign country's purity laws. At first he liked that he was defiling himself
with something pure, but after a couple of the pints he decided that maybe his liking it
and its purity would defeat his purpose. After that he proceeded to the scummiest beer
parlours he could find, pushing through wind and rain from one to another, longing for
enlightenment in bottoming-up vile tasting lagers and popping stale nuts and salty
snack foods.
Eventually he forgot his purpose, forgot that he was supposed to be finding
another foul bar, and accidentally thought about home. He had a momentary panic of
not remembering where that was, or if he even had one, during which he stumbled into
the back of Pandora, a kind-hearted prostitute. She fell into the wet street, and rolled
with it just as her self-defence training had prepared her to do. The umbrella which
had been keeping her more or less dry in the blustery wet weather was crumpled in
the process.
"Hey!" she yelled, picking herself up off the cement and kicking at the mangled
umbrella. "Can't you bloody-well watch where you're walking?!" He blubbered
unintelligibly as she inspected the shallow scrapes on her hands. "Fucking moron!"
she barked, then checked her clothing to find that she had torn her third pair of
stockings that week and had scuffed both her jacket and skirt. "Asshole!" she cursed
and flipped him the finger. Then she muttered to herself "And just when I was about to
pack it in after a God damned slow night." She stopped herself from cursing him a
third time because, in part, she saw that his head was shorn — something she has
always found odd but appealing in men — but mostly because she had looked into his
sad eyes and, despite the coldness of the street lamp and the rain pouring over his
booze-bleared eyes, she thought she recognized in them something which brought a
lump to her throat.
"Go on," she barked over that lump. "Go on! Get lost, you God damn drunk!

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You think I've got nothing better to do than curse you for knocking me down?" When
he said nothing, but moved his eyes from hers to her perkily nippled tits, at which he
stared intently, she barked "Well I do! Oi! What are you looking at? These mommas
don't come cheap! If you want to touch them with more than your eyes, it'll cost ya!"
Like a skilful fly fisher naturally bringing to her hook a chary bass, she began to stretch
back to both enhance the shape of her breasts and move them away from his ogling
eyes. But her mind shouted to her that he had spent his money on booze already, so
she stopped fishing. She discerned that his clothes were badly outdated and just
about threadbare, which further bespoke of a dearth of funds, even before his having
gotten drunk. She relaxed, turned her back to him and began to walk away. "What a
night!" she cursed, "What a wasted night."
With a drunken slur he solemnly pleaded "May I feel them? Your breasts, I
mean." She kept on walking. "I would really like to feel your breasts," he cried out
desperately, stumbling after her. "I haven't felt anyone's since my mother's. When I
was a baby. And I can't even remember the face I had before I was born let alone her
sweet, soft, warm tits." Pandora stopped, then turned to look at the source of such a
peculiar, heartfelt, supplication. Before she could think to say anything, he fell to his
knees and started to cry "And all I've got to pay you with is my Soul!" Despite her best
intentions and years of perfecting her professionalism, her heart went to him. Then
she heard him mutter "And all I have to gain is my enlightenment."
After a long blubber-filled near-silence she said "Sure," with a rueful chuckle
and resigned shake of her head. "Come on," she said, dropping her tough-stuff voice
and moved to him. She grasped him by the arm with "you don't need to beg!" and
helped him back to his unsteady feet. Pandora had accepted the reality that her stars,
which were normally weak on the best of days, were particularly badly aligned that
week. And she found what he said quixotic, despite having understood little of his
babble — except for the breast part. She also liked the directness of his sad, sad eyes,
despite his drunkenness, and felt an inexplicable...she stumbled for the word to
describe her feelings. It wasn't kinship, exactly, but she felt emotionally closer to him
than the stranger he was. "Kithship"? "Yup," she said to herself, "kithship. A nice word
to describe the inexplicable connection between strangers as they fumbled through
life's bleak and colourful calamities and good fortunes."
The unenlightened monk seemed surprised, pleased and embarrassed all at
the same time at her answer, which Pandora found very endearing. What she did not
know was that he had requested the same thing of several women already that night,
all of whom had either slapped his face or laughed derisively at him. And when he
timidly reached for Pandora's breasts, in nervous fits and starts, she quietly laughed at
his slow seriousness and intensity. She gently took his hands in hers and said, "Hey,
mister, let me take you home first." Normally she would not have done this but,
because it was a slow night and because she recognized that he was an unique
customer who obviously did not belong on the streets knocking down and feeling up
prostitutes, she felt compelled to take him home. And, she mused, maybe there might
actually be a few bucks, although his threadbare clothes again emphasized the
"fewness" of them. "But," she added with her usual edged optimism, "don't judge a
book by its cover, even if you buy it by its cover, as I always say."
With patience and persistence she was eventually able to get from him a

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comprehendible version of his address, to which she directed the cabbie. During the
ride he began talking non-stop and increasingly loud about what sounded like
gibberish to her. Was the eightfold path something to do with ironing sheets? she
wondered with a shrug. But she knew all about enlightenment, from first hand
experience with a couple of her overweight regulars — when they rolled off of her!
Once disembarked from the cab, he weaved them across the empty parking lot.
Pandora was so busy keeping him from falling and joyfully bellowing that she did not
notice that the dilapidated looking place was not an apartment complex. She just
thought that its tenant parking lot was unusually large and empty.
Pandora's familiarity with the covert handling of drunks managed to keep him
quiet until they entered the monastery, where she had to quickly cover her own mouth
to muffle the "Holy shit!" that wanted to burst from her when she saw not the unlit halls
hiding gaping holes filled with dirt between rank and torn carpeting, but the brilliant
gleam of the gold plated Buddha and the lustre of the beautifully maintained hardwood
floors. "Well, I'll be damned," she said to herself and gave the drunk and his shorn
head a second look, one which couched both more respect and bemusement. "Just
when you think you've seen everything.... I'll be doubly damned!" Then she took in a
deep breath in order to inhale the aromas. Musky sandalwood incense, sharp floor
wax and wax candles, and, faintly, cooked garlic and onions and beans. "This must be
what heaven smells like!" she said.
With his mouth now uncovered, the unenlightened monk burbled in a drunk's
rather too loud stage whisper "This way! My cell is this way!" and waved his arms in
generally in all directions. The knuckles of his left hand thwacked the Buddha's large
belly with a hollow ka-chung which reverberated for a long time. "Hungry, are you?"
he asked the idol's belly. "Well, then, I guess that's how you got such a big gut —
always stuffing yourself with discontent souls! Well, you didn't eat me!" He kissed it
with an exaggerated smack and then giggled loudly before the kind-hearted prostitute
once again covered his mouth. They wove their way down the hall. Despite her efforts
they bumped the walls several times and each time they did he laughed behind her
hand like a kid having just discovered the joy of madly driving bumper cars.
Fortunately, for the other residents, their exhausting meditation regime, as well
as their having become inured to the unenlightened monk's percussive nocturnal
peregrinations, kept the monks from responding to the noise except by grumbling as
the rolled over and/or covered their ears.
Pandora and the unenlightened monk entered his small room, where he
immediately began to undress. As he was unsteadily removing his pants over his
shoes he lost his balance and grabbed Pandora's shoulder to keep himself from falling
backwards. But his drunkenness added weight to his momentum which dragged her
onto the futon with him. The crash shook the bedroom walls. A softer bed would have
crumpled. As it was, his fall crushed ETC who was, as usual, there dreaming of
mousing Buddha-bellied rodents. So it was that ETC was surprised to find himself
dead on only his second life, his dream mouth comfortably stuffed with a dead fat
mouse who imagined that he would with this death be free from the bodily mires of
pain, desire and walking fur ball factories.
"Hey!" a muffled voice through the walls could be heard, "Keep it down in there!"
A few other faint voices could be heard from farther away in a muffled and haunting

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echo.
"Shhhhhh!" the monk slurred. He had forgotten about his Enlightened Tom Cat
and did not notice ETC's crushed body beneath his unenlightened bulk. The drunk
monk lost at losing his virginity with the now naked prostitute who, astride him, rocked
and quietly moaned with as much professional encouragement as she could muster at
that late hour. But the booze kept him down and she stopped proffering passion when
he began to snore. He had obviously had a bad hair day today, she thought with a
smile, and rubbed his head. But it had been a very long day for her too, so that instead
of getting up and leaving immediately after sliding off of him as she had originally
intended, she laid down crosswise on the futon beside him.
She thought about the peculiarities of life while distractedly playing with his
matted chest with her fingers. And before she knew it, the aura of safety and warmth
which exuded from the monastery imparted a feeling of contentment within her that
Pandora had not felt since early childhood. She felt embraced by peace and fell into a
deep, naked sleep.
When the monk woke later that morning he discovered first that his head was
splitting itself open, then, through bleary eyes, that there lay breathing beside him a
naked woman who's breasts seemed to be pointing accusing nipples at him. After
what seemed to be an eternity of being stared at by those rhythmically moving capped
red aureole's, he forced his head to move and he saw on the bed beside her the inert
and obviously dead body of his friend and companion, ETC. Through his closed lids
the monk felt ETC's eyes fly into his like darts.
With those darts he felt ashamed with the memory of his intention last night —
and its obviously deadly, but completely unremembered, fruition. He racked his
wrecked brain cells, in vain, to recall that he had been too inebriated to do anything
but touch those tits and insensibly kill his cat.
When Pandora's left nipple winked at him, he clutched his stomach and ran,
naked, for the bathroom down the hall. On his way there he bowled over the abbot
who was knocked unconscious when his head bounced off the floor. The
unenlightened monk would forever link his cat's death with his having thrown away his
innocence, all hope of escaping from the cycle of life and death, women's breasts and
the projectile vomit with which he painted the bathroom.
He rested his cheek against the cool lip of the porcelain toilet bowl and
splashed its water in a wasted attempt to cool his face, clear his eyes and calm his
head. He felt his heart tear itself apart. Then, out of the bowl, he experienced his most
genuinely "Zen" act in the fifteen years he had been in the monastery. In a flush the
unenlightened monk realized that he could never be a Buddhist and promptly
renounced Buddhism "and every other goddamned religion!"
He cried for his wasted life.
After a while he clumsily stood up and eased his hands over his pulsating and
prickling scalp. He tried to remember what hair felt like, but the be all was his massive
headache so he properly washed his face at the sink and, with a stomach he had to
forcefully keep from jumping up his throat, cleaned the bathroom of his vomit before
slouching back to his cell with paper towelling draped protectively over his genitals.
He dressed quickly, restraining, as much as he could, his desirous eyes from
tracing the naked woman's body. Despite his efforts his eyes rested on her face and

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its endearingly child-like make-up smears. Inexplicably he felt rebuked by her gentle
smile and apparently peaceful sleep. After cinching his too short belt into place, he
looked up at the smiling Buddha. The Buddha was laying on his side, having fallen
with the shock wave of the monk and prostitute hitting the futon earlier that morning
and killing ETC. The Buddha's normally upraised hands now pointed to the door. The
unenlightened monk took this as a synchronicity and thus a sure sign of his failure and
destiny. He quickly recited a short death chant for ETC, then threw his few remaining
clothes and personal effects into a pillowcase.
He left the monastery and did not look back.

As for Pandora, when she woke she found the monk gone and that she was
naked, sharing the bed with a dead, but apparently smiling, cat. As she gazed at the
dead tom, she reflected on the previous night. Again, something about the monk's
pathetically sad and desperate eyes struck her heart. Eventually, while laying in his
bed with the dead cat, looking up at the ceiling, she was surprised when the
recognition she had inexplicably felt when he had pleaded with her in the middle of
the drunken night gelled into a strong sense that she had been feeling his kind of
sadness and desperation herself these last few years. Turning tricks, which had for so
long seemed like easy money, had come to feel like a waste of her life. She began to
weep, and without thinking, but needing someone to share her pain, gently stroked the
stiffening Bilgewater-ETC.

Pandora's petting was all Bilgewater-ETC's spirit, two dimensions and three
planes away, needed to purr itself out of the cycle of life and death. But the generosity
he had learned in the monastery inspired him to become a "Bodhi-cattva". With the
generosity of having become a "Bodhi-cattva" came the concomitant open-
heartedness which enabled him to hear his old name called out by a familiar voice.
"Bilgewater? Bilgewater? Is that you?" he heard a voice that sounded like his dead
Bedlam calling him. His spirit, unbeknownst to him, had generously made itself
manifest for Bedlam in her Hell in Heaven.
When he next opened his eyes from what felt like a dreamless and delightfully
refreshing sleep, it seemed to him that he had arrived in what could only be the
Heaven Bedlam had endlessly described when she was alive. As he was struggling
to recover from the shock of the existence of Heaven, in contradistinction to what he
had come to believe from his Buddhist days, Bilgewater-ETC felt familiar hands grab
him around his ribs and lift him up and around. Her hands moved him too quickly for
him to enjoy the panorama which blurred by his eyes. Before he could say Bilgewater
Blues, his eyes were face to face with Bedlam's. It was she he had heard calling his
name, and who had picked him up and was now looking into his eyes just like she had
always done.
"Et tu, Bilgewater?" she asked sadly, her voice cracking a little from the
emotional pulls she felt between the joy of once again having his companionship, and
knowing that feeling such joy at someone close to her having gone to Hell was at best
selfish and at worst a Christian abomination. "You've come to Hell, too!" Then she
cried a little for him and his eternal torment. When she finished crying she
surreptitiously thanked God for this small but enormous blessing. Even more than

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masturbation, Bilgewater's presence gave her an enormous boost of heart and

strength with which to continue fending of the Devil during her protracted existence in
Hell.
By this time Bilgewater-ETC had adjusted himself to the realization that he was
indeed, as well as body — if it was possible to even be embodied in Heaven — in
Heaven. He was having a hard time understanding what Bedlam had said about
being in Hell.
"Look around you, Bilgewater," Bedlam said, as if reading his mind like she had
always done. And, as she had always done, she swung him around holding him in his
armpits with about as much elegance as a sack of potatoes. "See! See all those
smiling faces? They are a lie! A clever lie, to be sure. They are very well painted,
their smiles and friendly faces."
Bilgewater-ETC could see clearly that they were not a lie. And he realized that
she could no longer understand him. Since becoming a "Bodhi-cattva" he could see
beneath the surface of things. He saw that this "Heaven" was Bedlam's construct, but
that she had somehow managed to wed her Heaven to Hell as if they were a
"Westernized", heavenly-bodied construction of the Taoist's Tai-ch'i-t'u, with black and
white inside one another. Bedlam's wedded schism reminded Bilgewater-ETC of one
of the monk's at the monastery and his endless fascination with the Taoist implications
which riddled Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In particular the monk often used
ETC as a sounding board whenever he recited, among other things, the "Voice of the
Devil":
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the cause of the following
Errors:
1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body and a Soul.
2. That Energy, called evil, is alone from the Body and that Reason called Good
is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of
Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or
outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

[Blake, William. "The Voice of the Devil" (Plate 4),

from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.]

"Did you hear that, ETC," the monk would almost shout with excitement,
"'Energy is Eternal Delight!' Doesn't that remind you of the I Ching's description of Yin
and Yang?" It seemed like babble to Bilgewater-ETC at the time, but he thought that it
might help Bedlam. Bilgewater-ETC opened his mouth to tell her that "Energy is
Eternal Delight" but "Meow" was all he heard himself say. That shut him up for a few
minutes. The implications of that "meow" reverberated inside his head ominously.
Now, he thought, that I am dead I seem to have the ability to remember the details of a

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massive poem-like thing such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and all I can say is
"meow"? "Kowabunga," he tried to say. "Meow," was all he said.
"I know, I know. It was a shock to me too. Hell is not what I thought it'd be."
Bilgewater-ETC was surprised and happy for Bedlam when he realized that she had
obviously heard him for the first time in his life. And after life. He thanked Heaven that
his ears would no longer be subjected to Bedlam's bellowing.
But he was also puzzled and very worried. He wanted to tell her everything that
had happened to him, how he had become enlightened, and that this was indeed
Heaven, not Hell, and that the Energy of life was beyond both of them, but when he
opened his mouth all he heard himself say, again, was a long "Meeeooowwwwww."
He looked at her with as much intelligence as he could, willing her to understand that
he understood her and could help. He dreaded the thought that now that she could
hear him she could no longer understand him.
"There, there," Bedlam said softly. "It'll be alright. I've been here for nine years
and know the ropes and all their tricks. You'll be alright with your Grandma Bedlam."
She looked him straight in the eyes then touched her nose to his like she always did.
He had forgotten that she had liked to do that. And he was surprised when he found
himself disliking it as much now that he was a "Bodhi-cattva" and dead as when he
was alive and ignorant. He tried to tell her to stop, but all that he wound up saying was
"Meeeooowwwwww."
Good grief, he thought, and looked all around himself. Where am I going to find
a fat monk here? Everyone is thin and very, very light on their feet. He looked Bedlam
in her eyes and pleaded for her to understand. "Meeeooowwwwww." He wanted to
cry but felt his tail flick instead. "Meeeooowwwwww!"

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