Laurie Penny - Your Orisons May Be Recorded

All prayers are answered, but sometimes the answer is no.

And sometimes the answer is: Let me talk to my manager and get back to you.

Really, the caller is saying, Ive been donating to the church for years. Going every Sunday. He wanted that. He wanted us to get married there. Its legal now. Honestly, I expected better service, but I think persuading him to come home is the least you can do at this point. The clients voice shakes a little with frustration. Amen, he adds.

I understand your frustration, I say. I really do understand, and I appreciate your patience, Mr. Rimington-Pounder.

Across the desk, Grem, my cubicle buddy, collapses in a fit of silent laughter. Gremory is a demon, so hes allowed to laugh at the unfortunate, including the unfortunately-named.

I try to explain to Mr. Rimington-Pounder, as gently as possible, that prayer is not a vending machine, where you pop in a certain amount of devotion and miracles drop into your hands.

Is there the client moistens his lips. Is there someone higher up the chain I can talk to?

Certainly, sir, I say, in my best friendly call center assistant voice. Let me just put you on hold for a moment.

I press the mute button and roll my eyes at Gremory.

Let me guess, says Grem, Rimjob wants to speak to someone higher up?

I nod. Of course he wants to speak to someone higher up. Everyone wants to speak to someone higher up. But you cant speak to the manager.

The manager is absent.

I take Mr. Rimington-Pounder off hold and adopt a different voice, a mans voice. Something broad and comforting and Midwestern. Authoritative.

What can I do for you, sir? I ask. The client is soothed by this voice. I let him talk. I follow protocol and offer a lot of unspecified redemption without actually promising anything at all.

Human beings are generally confused. Thats where we come in. Mainly, as the floor supervisor explained in a recent slideshow presentation, humans are confused about wants and needs. Theyre always on their knees begging for things they want rather than asking for things they need. Its very important to steer them away from the wants and speak to the needs, not that we could solve them, becauseas the supervisor explainedthat would just be too easy.

Wants and needs. Of all the indignities of flesh, Im really glad that problem doesnt apply to me.

I know exactly what I want.

Thats my problem.

Where is this place?

Somewhere overhead. Somewhere between thought and memory. You might catch a glimpse of it from the window of an airplane, with the dawn burning in over the endless blankets of cloud and all the lights dim in the cabin. You might tell yourself you didnt see what you saw.

Do angels walk in the clouds?

Not if we can help it. Its damp and full of weather balloons.

But can you peer through the mists rolling around the lower levels of heaven? Did you see the endless tower blocks of human resources tangle through the curds of cumulonimbus, in the deathless place where they serve Him night and day in His temple with monthly production goals and customer satisfaction surveys?

Angels work. Of course we do. Were all on zero-hour contracts. Time, after all, is a human idea.

We get twenty-five minutes of it for lunch, with deductions for any bathroom or smoke stops we might have taken. Hating your boss is also a human idea.

The day everything changes, I spend my lunch in the break room with Gremory. There are many rooms in my Fathers house, but only one with a functioning coffee machine.

Gremory wears his hair long and shaggy, which is against regulations, but he has the highest client satisfaction rate on our floor. He has this ability to be nice to every caller without letting the slow grind of their daily trauma worry him too much. Its a demon thing.

Grem waves to me from behind his copy of Kerrang! They tell us its important to stay authentic, but Grem doesnt need to try very hard at that. Hes sitting with his feet up on a swivel chair, reading his magazine and eating a ham sandwich.

You shouldnt let it get to you, he says, seeing my face. I never let it get to me. This is true. Every demon I know is a profoundly chilled-out individual. Our two spheres incorporated over a thousand years ago, and the merger has been a big morale boost all-round.

I hate not being able to do anything for them, I say, grabbing a coffee from the machine. The heartbroken ones, most of all. You shouldnt laugh at them. Its not their fault.

Human hearts, says Gremory, are brittle, but also durable. I should know; Ive eaten thousands. You should never attempt to engage one while its still beating. I advise against it.

Youre jealous because nobody wants to fuck you because youre a demon.

That, says Gremory, pushing half a sandwich into his second mouth, is a vile stereotype. I get mine. I just dont like drama.

I cant bear the lovesick ones, though. Theyre so pathetic. And theyre always killing themselves, or each other. My ones do, anyway.

Your problem is that you keep trying to talk them through it, says Grem. I just tell mine to take a walk in the sunshine. Its not like they remember the calls.

Thats not quite true. They remember the calls in snatches, like the dregs of dreams you cant touch with your tongue, draining away. A sense of something profound, whether its redemption or frustration, vanishing on the edge of vision.

Our repeat business is booming.

I submit to you, says Grem, that you are projecting, my friend. I submit to you that youre getting stressed because youve been due another of your dramatastic love affairs for years, and youre bored, and you need to learn to relax. Grem wipes his hands on his untucked shirt.

If you will insist on romancing the doomed, he says, Go and fuck a panda.

I throw my empty coffee cup at him.

They tell you not to fall for human beings because they always die. For me thats part of it. Thats their beauty and their tragedyeverything is always rotting, puckering and falling apart under your hands, and you claw at them with your kisses to slow the tug of time but you cant. The panic in their eyes when they reach the age when they realize that, yes, its happening to them too.

The way they swallow their breath at the point of orgasm.

I cant get enough.

Some of us are perfectly happy counting dust motes in sunlight, or recording the little lives of the luminous creatures at the bottom of the ocean trenches who live and die and drift to the sea floor and know nothing but darkness.

Not me.

Loving humans is what got me demoted.

A long time ago, before the current system, when there were far fewer of them, it was our job to walk among men and women and all the other human creatures and teach them things they needed to know. Writing and calculus and basic food hygiene. We were allowed to give real advice, back then, and we taught them a lot. But they taught us things, too.

They taught us what it is to fear death and to nourish hope. They taught us about pleasure. And passion. And love. Love more than anything. I have always been drawn to the ones who burn with it, the ones who take their tiny lives in trembling hands and try to wring out all the juices before its too late.

I love fucking human men.

I love loving them, too, though if Im honest, the fucking is quite a significant part of it. Nothing is ever just sex.

I loved a scientist, once, in Babylon, in the land between the two rivers. His beard was slight and his eyes were black and fronded with long, long lashes, and it was the eighth century after they killed the Nazarene, and he found me in a decorative jar in the market, where a witch whose son I had seduced kept me prisoner for a decade.