My death back in 1968 terrified me despite a lifetime of preparation. A freak capacity for one-channel omniscience had convinced me to ignore my limitations. I could know anything knowable, but only one thing at a time, only in terms my restricted comprehension, and only if I "asked." The future is not entirely knowable.

When I chose to go to Hell, I knew there was a chance of toppling Satan from his throne, but I did not know whether I would succeed or fail. If I could steal his cloak of power, I would wreak vengeance on him for taking my sister. I would then restore what was left of her soul. If the Devil learned of my plans, if he saw through my ruse of being an ordinary bus driver form Buffalo, he would squash my hopes and plans in an instant.

When I realized I was dead, the horrid truth sank in that I had staked my eternal future on my ability to play stupid. I lost all faith in that ability when one of the Dark Angel's attentions fell squarely on me. Satan had stored me unconscious, along with ten thousand other lost souls, in preparation for a welcome to Hell. He had erased my memory of death and deceived me into thinking that I was back at the wheel of my bus. It took me only a moment to see through the deception and to sense that one of his demons lay in wait on my route.

A normal driver would have been thoroughly puzzled when nobody boarded at the first crowded stop. I pretended to be puzzled. I yelled for people to hurry up and get on. When people kept rubbing their ungloved hands and looking in every direction but mine, I swore under my breath in puffs of cold steam. I cranked the doors shut in a huff, released the air brakes, then headed to the next stop where people again failed to notice that I existed.

Another bus driver might have been relieved to see Alan Funt of Candid Camera standing at the Fairview stop. The corners of my mouth struggled to lift themselves into a ghastly smile when the Funt imitation boarded the bus. My hand shook like a skateboard on gravel as it reached for the outstretched palm of the impostor. "Do you know who I am?" it asked.

"No."

"Have you ever watched Candid Camera?"

"Oh, y-you m-must be Alan Funt!"

There was no need to fake terror when Mr. Funt turned hot red and growled through erupting fangs. His hand transmogrified into a claw that would not let go. Horns sprouted from his head. Bloodshot eyeballs bulged from their sockets. "Scream!" yelled the monster, "You're not on Candid Camera. You've died and gone to Hell!"

I screamed. Any second now the demon might announce what a fool I was for trying to deceive his master. Lucifer himself might bellow out a victorious laugh. How sorry I was to have chosen this path in death.

Pain engulfed my face when flames shot out of the demon's throat. His jaws clamped around my neck, shook me out of the bus, then slammed me spine-first into the sidewalk. It cracked open and the wet soil beneath it engulfed me. Men and women with umbrellas walked past above without seeing me.

In the blackness underground I got hold of my senses again, all six of them. Instinctively I wondered if my secret was safe. As always, the answer came without delay; no channel of Satan's omniscience had bothered to ask any damning questions about my abilities as a primitive point-conscious sentient. I wondered if Satan continued to hold me in the focus of any of his visions, and was relieved to discover that he was yawning contentedly and letting his thoughts drift away. He was savoring the aftertaste of the ultimate horrified shock of ten thousand souls. His spiritual orgasm was complete.

I tried to convince myself that I was here to rescue the hordes of twisted souls who had strayed from a jealous God. But it was more personal than that. I would never have chosen as I did if not for the loss of my twin sister, Becky. She had been a happy child, but mischievous and strong-willed. She had committed nothing worse than the usual sins and saw no hurry in committing herself to Jesus. Without Jesus, though, even the kindest person is destined for eternal torment. Jesus is the only way to Heaven, and Becky never gave herself to him.

I had always averted my second sight from the realms of the dead until my sister and mother were hit by a truck on their way home from the grocery store. In death, at the tender age of eight, Becky suffered an act of more sinister finality than the loss of earthly flesh. Her buttercup-and-honey soul was torn apart by the Evil One himself. Satan gored the substance of her being and scattered its remains across his kingdom. That sight ripped an eternal scream through the darkness behind my conscious mind.

I sought neither drugs nor the amnesic peace of God's angels. Our Lord-praising mother had died only minutes before Becky. In heaven she knew nothing of her daughter being ripped to shreds. There is no room for awful sights or bad memories in paradise. God had relieved her of any trace of acquaintance with her once-beloved children. "I will love you forever," she had once said, "no matter what happens."

Her serenity was not for me. I wanted to keep my love for Becky even if it meant living with the nightmare of her dismemberment. Even if it meant an exit from the omnipresence of God. My drug and my sanity was a plot of revenge.

No other soul in the cosmos was in such a unique position for revenge. Satan had a million eyes peeled for challenges to his rule but not a one on me. If he had bothered to wonder whether any humans possessed my talent he would have exposed my secret in an instant, but that would have been like wondering whether any monkeys could read. The odds against a point-conscious creature being able to access the Transcendental Information Superhighway (as they call it nowadays) were so remote that even God ignored them.

I hung from a cross, naked and alone in a huge empty cavern lit with a dim glow from no particular source. Hunger gnawed at my stomach. Cold sweat scalded the blisters on my face. Mosquitoes feasted on my legs. There was no point wasting time. In my loudest voice I cursed God for abandoning me. The curse echoed and reverberated throughout the subterranean chamber. Somewhere in the distance a stalactite cracked free and shattered on the rocks below. A tinkling of pebbles rained down a wall, and two unseen boulders made satisfying plunks in a dark pool. The mosquitoes stopped biting and my charred face became smooth and supple again.

A friendly old man with circular glasses and a carved wooden cane walked out of a shadow. "Congratulations," he said. "God didn't hear you, because he only stopped here once for three days a couple of thousand years ago. But somebody else heard you and would like to offer you a nice reward. You're a basically decent sort, and the master appreciates your telling God right away what you think of Him. That's all the qualifications you need for a place in the suburbs. Come with me."

I was tempted to tell the old gentleman that I liked his appearance better now than when he did the Funt thing, but I restrained myself.

After a deep and lengthy sleep, I found myself floating with the kindly old demon in a fine blue sky over a neatly laid out suburban community. Late model cars cruised down wide avenues. A warm breeze caressed neat rows of palm trees. There was a swimming pool in every back yard.

The old man floating beside me looked vaguely familiar but my most recent memory was of jerking the wheel of my bus wildly to avoid hitting a young child. All memory of Alan Funt and the cave had been erased until I wondered what it was that I had just forgotten. There is no point trying to fool someone who is even partly omniscient.

My guide was saying, "Welcome to Afterworld. You just had a little argument with a telephone pole, so you won't be living in Buffalo any more." He pointed down. "I'll introduce you to some people having a barbecue under the willows at the edge of that golf course. They are expecting you. One of them is a real estate agent who can take you around to select a home after lunch. I'm sure you'll enjoy your life here."

My arrival in the so-called Afterworld meant I was successful in moving to within one step of the seat of Satan. The layout of Hell had changed since Dante's time. Following Machiavelli's advice, the Devil filled the second sphere of Hell with happy, harmless beings and kept the more dangerous ones at a distance. Millions of recent arrivals were watching my transfer to Afterworld on television. Many believed that they too could have spent eternity in comfort if only they had promptly cursed God. That thought added a self-reproaching hue to the texture of their misery. Satan was a connoisseur, preferring quality pain over quantity, except during his frequent tantrums.

My welcoming party wore polo shirts, loose-fitting blouses, and big smiles. They were whatever ages they wanted to be. A round of handshakes and introductions made me feel welcome. Imported beer, hamburgers, hot dogs, and potato salad all had just that perfect taste that lingers like hickory smoke in the tongue's memory. Freshly cut grass and a not-too-distant seashore made the air a pleasure to breathe.

My realtor, Agnes, had deeply alluring eyes that wouldn't let me look at anything else for more than a minute or two. She told me, "We all work at fulfilling jobs and take long vacations. There are so many alien visitors in Disney Afterland that it's hard to tell the tourists from entertainers. No criminals prowl our streets at night. We still talk to our counselors about the little fingers of uneasiness that creep into our psyches, but that's just part of being dead."

None of the people in suburbia had yet been soul-damaged beyond a brief orientation session like my run-in with the Funt demon. Memories of that episode were locked behind a thick oaken door in the mind's basement.

After five days of house-hunting, guided tours, welcoming parties, career counseling, a house-warming party, and a night of great sex in the real estate office lounge, I finally got a chance to go to the local library. There was a very old book on the bottom shelf that I pretended to find by accident. In it were Latin magic spells and a map showing how to climb to the highest peak in the mountains above suburbia, way beyond the ski resort. That mountain would be my stepping stone to the innermost circle of Hell.

What I saw as enormous spheres within spheres were really dimensions within dimensions. To move on to the next dimension one manipulated one's receptivity to it. The transition was terribly painful for higher beings who could sense their passage through interdimensional chaos. True understanding of the shift required a complicated multi-aware mathematics. Chanting the right spell was a shortcut for those of more limited means.

Hiking to the peak took twelve long hours. I brought Agnes and some of her co-workers with me, because a group of half-drunk partiers reciting ancient chants on a mountain top at dawn was normal by dead young American standards. A lone teetotaler with no history of mental illness would have caught one of the Dark Angel's attentions. For a brief but horrible moment one of his attentions did flicker over us then passed on immediately to more weighty matters.

Agnes was the only person besides me who had sensed the Devil's brief presence. After a hundred and fifty years of happy death, she was entering the final stretch of her suburban existence, the phase where sensitivity to evil heightens. Near the end of that phase, objects start moving around the house at night, and vaporous faces appear in mirrors. Voices call one's name through the wind. Eventually the old oak door in the basement bursts open and all Hell breaks loose.

That cloak of power was my target. One bite on the hem would coarse enough power through my body to make me a much bigger rat. Big enough to pull the cloak right off its owner if he was foolish enough to loosen the straps as he had done so many times before.

I chose the moment carefully. Satan was initiating another ten thousand arrivals and turned almost all his attentions on them for maximum pleasure. He still kept tabs on the highest beings, but this was not a time to contemplate rodents, no matter how unusual their behavior. After the fun he would ignite a great Cuban cigar and let most of his attentions drift off with the smoke.

I left a torchlit hallway and zig-zagged purposefully through gaps in the masonry toward the chamber of my unsuspecting nemesis. The timing was perfect; my whiskers poked into his boudoir at the moment of climax. To put a tingling edge on his release into satiation, the killer of my twin draped his cloak so lightly on his shoulders that it almost fell of its own accord. It had, in fact, so fallen a few times, making its startled owner laugh at himself and feel all the more powerful for having survived a momentary disempowerment.

When it slipped again this time, his immediate reaction was disappointment that the thrill of the first fall could never really be recaptured. Nevertheless, a good many of his attentions snapped awake to see if there was any real danger. They alerted him to a rat which had tugged on the fabric of his greatness. While some of his attentions were busy planning horrible retributions for this impudent vermin, others were getting alarming answers to ever more frightening questions. His power was gone.

By the time his shock wore off, he found himself staring helplessly at a barbarian warrior twice his size with gleaming eyes and a dark red cloak in his teeth. In his last moment as a multi-aware being, his expression was one of pleading. His eyes sent a startlingly swift and complex message: "Blame God for what has become of me. I used to be a trinity like Him. As a trinity I saw everybody, including the Almighty, from the inside. God didn't like the way I looked at Him, so he chopped a part of me away. He reduced from a trinity to a duality."

I raised my sword.

Another message flashed from the Devil's eyes: "A dual being can focus his thoughts on many things at once. I can show you how. Dual consciousness adds a new dimension to understanding, just like a second eye allows you to see in a third dimension. But even a dual being can only see from the outside. You don't know what it's like to remember being a trinity who can see people from the inside. I only try to crack people open to get inside them again. I only hate them for masking the inner substance that I want to love. Even when I possess their foolish bodies, it is still only my own pain that I feel, not theirs. And they do not feel the phantom pain of my severed unholy spirit. Help me!"

Help him, ha! When Freud tried to help him understand his castration the poor old analyst ended up with his id wrapped around his superego in a big tangled knot. Without a moment's hesitation my heavy sword sped down to sever the ex-lord of Hell into a pair of point-conscious leprechauns. They embraced, looked one another in the eye, then screamed and ran in opposite directions. Somewhere in the bowels of the castle, a third little leprechaun, blind and deaf, felt the terror of his two soul-mates beyond the hard layer of rock above him. The three were no longer one but were united in their memory of trinity lost.

I immediately set my long-rehearsed plan into action. The spheres of Hell began to revolve at near-light speeds to slow their time frames and give me the upper hand against coup attempts. I shut off the borrowed power of the keeper demons and issued an edict freeing their slaves. Quintillions of stunned beings from billions of galaxies crawled, ran, flew, swam, slithered, and rolled across the vast expanses of Hell. Some attacked their overseers. Others hid in rocks and cracks. Some fluttered about in circles babbling at the mob. Every few seconds I wondered what new plots were being hatched against me and scuttled them from afar.

It was necessary to launch more than one last minute lightning bolt against some giant bat or griffin that dove out of nowhere, aiming its talons at my newly donned cloak. Between attacks I gathered up the wisps and strands of what used to be Becky and put them in a safe place. Satan had never asked himself if it was possible to reconstitute a scrambled soul because he was afraid of the answer. I knew that she could be restored, though not in quite her original form.

My clumsy omnipotence finally prevailed and the castle disgorged its demons. When things seemed secure, I called a council of the wisest and most compassionate English-speaking people who had ever been damned (I planned to include others once the confusion subsided). I kept Agnes near me in order to free my remote sensing equipment for more urgent tasks. Despite being open a little too wide, her eyes were still so enchanting as to pull my attention away from the assembly and its urgent task of reconstructing the underworld.

Seated at one end of an impossibly long dinner table Einstein argued that, "You must convert yourself immediately to higher consciousness. Otherwise you will be outsmarted and overthrown."

"No way," I replied. "Converting my soul-stuff to higher consciousness would be like getting eaten by a bear. The prey becomes a bear, in a manner of speaking, but the process is not pleasant and the old identity is digested beyond recognition."

It was hard to keep my mind on Einstein when events all over Hell kept begging for intervention. As a further distraction, Agnes was reclining, bare-shouldered, on an Etruscan divan against the near wall. She gave me an alluring wink.

It would be foolish to blame her for what happened next. I was a monkey who had taken over the zoo. A coven of arch-demons hatched a plot to work through my defenses, then pounced on me unaware. It took them only a fraction of a second of their own time to figure it out when my mind strayed complacently from the job of uncovering such schemes. My last act as sovereign was to rip the cape to pieces.

As the demons fought for the scraps, I grabbed Agnes by the arm and raced out of the great banquet hall. We sped under the arches of the main corridor, barely maintaining balance as the castle shook. Suits of armor crashed to the floor. Sections of ceiling collapsed in clouds of angry dust. Flames danced in ecstasy from dislodged torches to wall tapestries, curtains, rugs, and banners.

We emerged from smoke into dense, bright fog and leapt blindly from the lower ramparts toward the ocean below. A fantastic gale blasted us and whipped away the fog a moment before we hit the waves. I guided my hysterical love to an underwater cavern where we surfaced for stale air just as our lungs were ready to suck in the sea.

"Hurry," I yelled. "We aren't safe yet!" We ran full speed through passages utterly devoid of light, but my inner eye could see our destination clearly.

There are places in Hell where the higher beings cannot see and cannot be. These are the little pores that constitute a network of dried foam between the dimensions. Higher beings lose their wits if they're not entirely in one dimension or another. Lower beings don't notice the difference. Satan had sealed off all the pores, but setting the spheres in motion opened them up again. Quintillions of uni-conscious souls flocked into them before a triumvirate of arch-demons fought their way to power and sealed them again. Only my girlfriend and I managed to make it to the pore under the castle.

Our lack of companions quickly became a problem. I had managed to hold on to a tiny scrap of the old cloak, which was enough to make a region of pseudo-space-time and a few dozen instant galaxies. The galaxies are full of lifeless planets that will remain forever lifeless unless we can get some more souls in here. Only the original physical universe is a nursery for souls, and only a fully trinitized God can create them. Darwin tried, shortly after his death, and was punished repeatedly for his failure.

Before long there were three of us. The safe place where I stored the fragments of Becky was in Agnes's womb. She could not have been impregnated by sperm alone. It took about nine months to revive the inner essence of my sister. She was born again to innocence, aside from a little spot of original sin which is hopefully not malignant. But she was blind. She was also deaf and mute. She had no sense of taste or smell or touch. Her way of reaching out to others was on the inside only; she could sense our feelings and know our thoughts.

In the meantime, Agnes and I haven't anyone else to talk to but each other for almost thirty years. We would be a great pair with other friends around but, without company, we tend to get on one another's nerves. For instance, she bragged that, "My fellow Presbyterians in the nineteenth century came closer to the right theology than any other Christians before or since, not to mention all those other misguided religions."

I snorted that, "Freshly dead atheists are only mildly surprised at being wrong, while a good many Presbyterians are downright shocked at being right. You must not have been all that good a Presbyterian if you ended up in Hell."

She got all red-faced and asked, "Did you end up any place better?" The conversation went downhill from there.

Nowadays, she can't even take a joke. She asks a lot of questions to take advantage of my omniscience, and that would drive me crazy if I gave a straight answer every time. She actually believed the one about defunct American corporations being sent to Hell after they were interpreted as "persons" under the fourteenth amendment. I laughed so hard that she didn't talk to me for two whole days. The next time I had a good laugh at her expense she grabbed my scrap of power for herself. She still won't give it back.

Becky reaches out to try and mediate but we have been tending more and more to resist these intrusions into our hearts and minds. Sometimes it bothers me to forget whether what I am doing is my own idea or not. Becky likes to influence even little decisions, that are none of her business, like what I will eat for breakfast. Just knowing that she is trying to calm my nerves after an argument with Agnes makes me tense. If I want to be upset, I have a perfect right to be.

I've been mulling over a solution to our problem and will probably continue to mull it for a long time. I can spend the rest of eternity with Agnes and my tele-empathic twin sister or I can go off by myself. Neither choice seems likely to preserve my sanity. The only other alternative is to return to Hell proper. That prospect is not terribly appealing to point conscious beings like me. But we have an extraordinary opportunity. My one-channel omniscience can supply the formula for the three of us to merge. Becky's special ability to see Agnes and me from the inside would be the catalyst. Agnes's local omnipotence would pull us together. I'm not in any hurry to stop being me, but we might just be able to conquer Hell again as a trinity.