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in on something I wear contacts. Oh yes.
    I grind the lenses Myself. They’re very strong. Well, you can imagine.
    You’d go blind just trying them on. And omnipotence-that takes it out of you. I mean if you want to work up a sweat try omnipotence for a few seconds. To heck with your jogging and isometrics and crash diets. Answering prayer that another one. Plugged in like the only switchboard operator in the world.
    You should hear some of the crap I have to listen to.
    “Dear God, put a wave in my hair, I’ll make You novenas for a month of Sundays.”
    “Do an earthquake in Paris, Lord, I’ll build a thousand-bed hospital.”
    “You like this? You like this sort of thing? Backstage with God? Jehovah’s Hollywood? Yes? Or maybe you’re archeologically inclined? Historically bent, metaphysically. Well here I am. Here I am that I am. God in a good mood. Numero Uno Mover moved. Come on, what would you really like to know?
    How I researched the Netherlands? Where I get My ideas?”
    “Sir, is there Life before Death?” one of the damned near Ladlehaus called out.
    “What’s that,” God said, “graffiti?”
    “Is there Life before Death?” the fellow repeated.
    “Who’s that? That an old-timer? Is it? Someone here so long his memory’s burned out on him, his engrams charred and gone all ashes? Can’t remember whether breakfast really happened or’s only part of the collective unconscious?
    How you doing, old-timer? Ladlehaus, right?” Ladlehaus remained motionless, motionless, that is, as possible in his steamy circumstances, in his smoldering body like a building watched by firemen. He made imperceptible shifts, the floor of Hell like some tightrope where he juggled his weight, redistributing invisible tensions in measured increments of shuffle along his joints and nerves. All he wanted was to lie low in this place where no one could lie low, where even the disciplined reflexes of martyrs and sty lites twitched like thrown dice. And all he could hope was that pain itself-which had never saved anyone might serve him now, permitting him to appear like everyone else, swaying in place like lovers in dance halls beneath Big Bands.
    “You, Ladlehaus!” the Big Band leader blared.
    Throughout the Underworld the nine thousand, six hundred and forty-three Ladlehauses who had died since the beginning of time, not excepting the accomplice to Ellerbee’s murder, looked up, acknowledged their presence in thirty tongues. These are my family, Ladlehaus thought, and glanced in the direction of the three or four he could actually see. Their blackened forms, lathered with smoke and fire damage, were as meaningless to him, as devoid of kinship, as the dry flinders of ancient bone in museum display cases. Meanwhile God was still out there.
    “Not you,” He said petulantly to the others, “the oldtimer.”
    He means me, Ladlehaus thought, this shaved and showered squire God in His summer linens means me.
    He means me, this commissioned officer Lord with his myrrh and frankincense colognes and aromatics and His Body tingling with morning dip and agency, all the prevailing moods of fettle and immortality.
    He means me, and even though he knew there had been a mistake, that he’d not been the one who’d sounded off, Ladlehaus held his tongue. He means me, He makes mistakes.
    “So you’re the fellow who spouts graffiti to God, are you?” God said and Ladlehaus was kneeling beneath Him, hocus-pocus’d through Hell, terrified and clonic below God’s rhetorical attention.
    “Go,” God said.
    “Be off.” And Ladlehaus’s quiet “Yes” was as inaudible to the damned as God’s under-the-breath “Oops”
    when He realized His mistake.
    And Ladlehaus thought Well, why not? He didn’t know me any better when He sent me here. He didn’t know my heart. I was an accomplice, what’s that? No hit man, no munitions or electronics expert sent from far, no big deal Indy wheel-man and certainly no mastermind. Only an