"George Alec Effinger - Unferno" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

prime-cut wife. He was in for it now. His mouth got very dry and his ears
started to ring. He had never felt so guilty in his life, and he knew that this
was absolutely the worst place he could be to be guilty. They had their
coldly methodical ways of adding up your score, he figured; and he sensed,
too, that it was just about half an hour too late to try to get by on charm.
He didn't yet have any idea how closely this Afterlife matched the various
versions he'd heard about or imagined on Earth, but it didn't make much
difference: there weren't many of them that welcomed uxoricides with
open arms.
The card. Rosenthal looked down at the card. The first question on it
was: How long has it been since your last confession?
Talk about shocked! Rosenthal just stared at it uncomprehendingly.
Slowly, like sewage backing up in the pipes of his old Brooklyn apartment,
meaning attached itself to the separate letters, then to entire words, and
at last to the question as a whole. They wanted to know how long it had
been since he'd "been to confession." Rosenthal knew he was really getting
off on the wrong foot here, and there didn't seem to be any way to make
himself more acceptable. He went up to the desk and waited until the
angel finished giving the same set of instructions to a freckled little Boy.
The angel glanced up. "You're not number forty-six, are you?"
"No," admitted Rosenthal. "I was number thirty-three. You want to
know how long it's been since my last confession, and I'm not even
Catholic."
The angel sighed. "Sorry about that, mate," he said. "Give me back that
card, then go over to desk R. Tell the angel your name and she'll punch you
up on her terminal. Actually, you've saved yourself some time this way."
"Is that good?" asked Rosenthal.
"Probably not," said the angel.
"Look, I'm really sorry." Rosenthal was now banking heavily on the
forgiveness-and-mercy angle.
The angel smiled sadly. "You people always try that one. Well, we'll see
how sorry you can be. Go over to desk R."
None of that sounded good to Rosenthal. He was about ready to throw
up by the time he found desk R. There was a crowd there, too, and he took
a number and waited. His feet and legs were getting tired. He didn't know
where he was, exactly it was like God's equivalent of the Atlanta airport,
where everybody had to go before they could go where they were supposed
to go but they didn't have chairs for the transients, only for the
employees. There was no way to tell how long he'd been waiting, either.
Nobody wanted to get into a conversation; everybody just stood around
and stared at the ground or at the card or form he was holding. Everyone
looked guilty. Everyone was guilty. So when his number was called,
Rosenthal went quickly to the desk, faced an angel with green eyes, and
put on a pleasant expression. His stomach was knotted tighter than when
the IRS had called him in for audits. Rosenthal suspected that everyone
here was in the same boat with him, so if he looked even a little more
co-operative by comparison, it couldn't hurt. He forced himself to smile.
"Hello," he said, "they sent me over here because I'm not a Catholic and "

"Name?" asked the angel.