Mohammed One raised his hands toward where he thought heaven might be, and wailed, "I can't stand it anymore! Allah, have mercy!"
But the sky, flame-streaked and smoky, remained unresponsive. So he sank to his knees and began to weep, but the ground was so hot it blistered his knees instantly and he screamed and leaped to his feet again. At least, when he was upright his sneakers could cushion the heat at what he had always understood as the opposite of the heaven of his dreams, that is, hell, also eternity's ground zero for grievous sinners.
At that moment, Mohammed Two came rolling in at high speed. "Try spinning as fast as you can," he said as he went. "You get blisters slower."
"I tried, but I bruised my elbows," wailed Mohammed One, watching the twirling Mohammed disappear into the smoky environs. Then he raised his scorched beard and pleaded once again to the ever reticent sky. "Why, oh, why, Allah, have you condemned me to hell? I gave my life in your service!"
But the sky did not respond. And then what he feared most came into view through the smoke-gray clouds - a passenger jet.
"No, no, not again!" Mohammed One pleaded. "Please, Allah, have mercy!"
But the plane cruised closer and then landed.
"Oh, Allah, preserve me," Mohammed One sighed, and wept, putting his hands to his face.
Then to door of the plane opened and the captain appeared in the doorway. While he was dressed like a pilot, he did have a red and nasty tail, which slapped as he spoke.
"All aboard!" he announced. "Time for another doomed flight!"
"I just can't do it again!" Mohammed One appealed. "My body is still healing from the last seven flights."
"So is mine," said the red-tailed captain. "But I have my orders." Then he raised his voice, calling, "Mohammed! Everybody named Mohammed who has been a terrorist who blew up a plane or threatened to do so and every terrorist by any other name who has been condemned for the same - we take off in one minute. And don't forget your explosive devices. You know the punishment for that - two extra flights a day for two weeks."
"Explosive devices?" Mohammed One questioned, feeling his body with both hands to detect if any were present on his blistered, scarred and regularly dismembered body. Then he felt a lump along his waistline. "Oh, there it is, just where I strapped it when I took my fatal flight. How I regret that day! Oh, if only I had to plan my life over again. I would never have become a terrorist! Osama lied to me. Lied! I am not in heaven, but in the hottest place in hell. I am not surrounded by virgins. The only women here are suicide bombers, who are way too hot to handle. And, worst of all, I know Allah has sent me here. Allah, the God I worshipped but betrayed. Betrayed and shamed! And Mohammed stood right beside him and was just as incensed at me. And, most mortifying of all, when Allah gave me the thumbs down, so did The Prophet. Oh, how could I have done such a miscreant thing?"
"All aboard!" the captain of the doomed airplane tolled. "Time to blow yourselves up again."
With his announcement, a long train of sad, bent, and often tearful terrorists entered from various directions, grumbling as they came, "Not again!" "Will it ever stop?" "I can't go on forever!" "But it's our punishment from Allah." "And we can never disagree with Allah."
"No, no, I can't endure it again!" Mohammed One cried in torment. "I've been in the hot seat more than I can bear!"
"I'm sorry, Mo," one of the train of repeatedly doomed Mohammeds said, pressing Mohammed One's shoulder with commiseration. "It is our fate, for eternity."
"Is there no escape?" Mohammed One asked, looking up at the ash-streaked visage of his condemned fellow felonist.
"None," said one of the other frightfully burned terrorists.
And the word was repeated along the entire line of these repeatedly doomed bombers. "None, none, none, till time is done!"
Then the red-tailed captain repeated his command, "All aboard. Self-destruction time again! Hesitate and you'll know a fate worse than incineration and dismemberment! You may even have to read a book of Western philosophy - maybe The Social Contract. Worse yet, a book about the ethic of Reverence for Life."
"We're coming," one of the terrorists complied, and took Mohammed One by the arm. "Come on. Time to die a violent and terrible death again."
"But we already died seven times today!"
"Yes, but, unfortunately, we've been condemned to eight times a day. So let's go. It's all in a day's dying."
"I wouldn't mind as much if I didn't know it's forever," Mohammed One confessed
. "Neither would I," the other Mohammed confided. "But Allah himself has condemned us to our fate. We did him wrong. He is, as we said so often, great, but, unfortunately for us, we did not understand that his greatness included love for every living thing, even for what we, in our false righteousness, called infidels. Even, God forgive me, love for the Americans and the English. Oh, how we sinned by killing people - innocent people, men, women, children, even babies in their mothers' arms. And how Allah was infuriated by our acts!"
"I will never forget that the Prophet Mohammed wept at the very sight of me and the other bombers who acted with me," another Mohammed in the doomed line lamented. "How," he asked, wiping a tear, "could we so disgrace the religion he gave us, whose very name of Islam means peace?"
"Peace?" yet another Mohammed intoned. "And what did we do but wage war against the very name of peace?"
"Oh, sinner, sinner, what a wretched sinner am I and all of us!" expostulated yet one more, "Now nothing more than the eternally doomed dupes of Osama Bin Laden!"
"Alas, Osama, I knew him well," commented another. "And soon he too will be in hell."
"And wretched as we!" cried another, "Doomed, one and all, to hell and back on flight after flight. There is no hope. No hope for us at all."
"Come on," the commiserating Mohammed told Mohammed One again. "Time to die but just once more. And after this flight - a cool night's sleep on rocks only warm. Up and off to our everlasting hot seats we go. The sooner we blow up again, the sooner we can be reassembled and get some blister-free relief."
With that, he tugged again on Mohammed One's arm.
Mohammed One looked up at him, knowing his fate was sealed, sealed for all time. So he rose and joined the parade of sullen terrorists as they headed for the doomed plane of the hour.
Up the metal stairs they trod their weary, molten-leaden way.
"I wish I could at least take a cold beverage with me," Mohammed One sighed.
"We all do," the Mohammed who had consoled him said. "But since we made bombs even out of harmless liquids, we are forbidden to take them aboard. We must not only die, but, on each flight, die of thirst!"
"Let's go, let's go, last flight of the day," the stern-browed pilot of the plane called Suicide said, as he hurried them in, and commented with some sarcasm, "No need for a security check. We assume the appointed ones for this flight have concealed their explosive devices."
When the last of them entered, the pilot closed the door and went into the cabin. He brushed his tail aside and took his seat.
Behind him sat all the Islamic terrorists who had killed other human beings, whether on planes or in any other way. They knew that some among them had a bomb on this trip but not which ones. That was always the mystery, eight flights a day and, worst of all, eights flights a day forever. The most they could hope for was to be near a blast, so their consciousness would be terminated instantly.
They knew from experience that the farther away from a bomb they were, the more hideous their deaths, as the plane broke open and they were sucked out into the suffocating sky and spun toward the bone-breaking floor of hell itself.
They heard the engines start and watched the plane back away from the gate. Then it turned and taxied along the runway. When it was at the appointed place, it turned, paused, and then hurtled toward takeoff and lifted off into the insubstantial, if smoky, sky.
And, oh, the terror they all felt, as the airplane ascended higher and higher into the ever thinner air, never knowing quite when the bomb would go off. And then it did. This time, as often happened, the plane exploded into flames, as the bombs on board happened to ignite the plane's fuel.
The doomed passengers were grateful. This time death was instant. And down they all plummeted, blown once again into incinerated scraps or whole but charred, down, down, back down to the worst hell they had ever imagined, where, once checked for certain death, they would be spontaneously reassembled, so that they might, on eight more flights the following day and the following day, for time immemorial, blow themselves up again.
And all they could think about is how religious they thought they were, once, when they were still alive - alive with the potential to serve Allah in life, in Allah's gift of life! - and how fooled they were by Osama Bin Laden and the other irreligious malefactors who headed Al-Qaeda, who lied to them and told them that to kill other human beings would please Allah and his prophet Mohammed and that they would surely go straight to paradise for the sacrifice of their hijacked lives.
How, oh, how, they wondered and wracked their minds, as the repeated flights ravaged their inflamed bodies, could they have believed these monstrous murderers, these personifications of evil itself, who they took for wise and holy representatives of Allah and his Prophet?
Why had it not occurred to them that if there was only one true God and his name is Allah, He was the God of all humankind, and if He was great, He loved us everyone, and what they had done, in killing any of us, had doomed themselves, one and all, to the worst punishment the God they had wanted with all their hearts and minds to please could condemn them to for as long as the tape measure of time unrolled, what now seemed to them, its woeful way.
Oh, if they only had their precious lives to live over again, how different they would have behaved. How full of the goat's milk of human kindness, instead of the purveyors of liquid bombs or any bombs at all.
But now they knew, knew for all time and to their own wretched shame, that Allah was not a pal a theirs.
Their only consolation was the certain knowledge that someday Osama Bin Laden and all the other terrorist misleaders were destined to be condemned to the same hell, and they awaited the time of his and their arrival with harsh questions and hot rocks. And no dream inflamed their imaginations more that the time when Osama Bin Laden would have to accompany them on flight after flight up from and then back down to the eternal infamy and flames of Allah's and Mohammed's justice, which in its infinite harshness seemed to them more like, if they dared even mention the word in regard to God and their Prophet, revenge - blistering-hot revenge.
Had their behavior been so terrible as to bring out such a response even from God and Mohammed? It seemed so and, in fact, certain, and that sorrowful realization so increased their woe that they would cry but they had not enough liquids in their parched bodies to supply their tears, and the few that welled over their lids when they could squeeze them out evaporated into the overheated air in which they sweltered even between doomed flights, not only loveless but despised of their God and their Prophet.
Tom Attea, humorist and creator of NewsLaugh.com, has had six shows produced Off-Broadway. Critics have called his writing "delightfully funny," "witty," with "great humor and ebullience" and "good, genuine laughs."