On the Banks of the River of Heaven

by Richard Parks

  They lay side by side on top of the low cliff. All Makan could think at first was that Gaena was indeed much stronger than she looked. He turned to his father and confirmed that, yes, Jal was breathing. Makan slapped the older man’s wrist until he opened his eyes.

  “Makan?”

  “I’m here, Father.”

  The older man coughed a few times and tried to sit up. “You saw . . . Your mermaid almost killed me!”

  “I did see. She’s not ‘my’ mermaid and she saved both our lives, you liar. You owe her an apology. We both owe her thanks.”

  “Liar? How dare you speak to your father that way!”

  “How? Easily, when I consider what you just tried to do!”

  Jal looked away. “I meant to try one more time to talk some sense into you, and then I got pulled in when she started singing, that’s all.”

  Makan turned to Gaena. “Is that true?”

  “I suppose,” the mermaid said. “Once he set sail for my island, he must have heard me then.”

  Makan nodded. “Meaning he was too far away to hear your song until he deliberately steered toward the island. Father, you had plenty of time to reach the island before I did. You were waiting on me!”

  Jal turned beet red, but Makan already knew it was the truth. Jal growled, “And what if I did? I had to show you what she is!”

  “I know what she is, Father. So do you.”

  Gaena looked from one human male to the other, the frown on her face deepening by the moment. “It’s rude to talk about someone in front of them, you know,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, Gaena. I think Father meant to kill himself and use your song as an excuse to do it.”

  “I meant to go look for your Mother,” Makan said. “Even though I knew it was useless. Then I found out about you and this . . . person, and thought of a better way of throwing my life away. I figured at least this way maybe my death would bring you to your senses.”

  Makan shook his head. “You’re no martyr, Father. This is about your pain, not mine.”

  “I didn’t want you to make the same mistake.” There were tears in the older man’s eyes.

  “Mistake? Father, look at me and tell the truth. If you had it to do all over again, when you found Mother helpless on the beach. Knowing now what you didn’t know then? What would you do?”

  “I—”

  “What would you do?” Makan repeated, relentless.

  Jal closed his eyes. “I’d have done the exact same thing. Heaven help me, but I am a fool.”

  “Why? Because you refuse to give up the happiest time of your life? If that’s a fool I’ll take a dozen. Why would you deny me a chance at what you had, even if, yes, it was only for a while?”

  Jal looked like someone had punched him in the face. He finally put his face down in his hands. “I never meant . . . .”

  “I know.”

  “Can you forgive me?”

  “I’ll think about it.” Makan then turned to Gaena. “Gaena, do you love me?”

  “Love you? I’m not even sure I like you at the moment. Between you and this crazy old man, I may never get any fish.”

  “I’ll be sure to bring you some. Now answer my question.”

  She looked at him. “Suppose I say ‘yes.’ What then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. So does your father, and so do I. That’s why I’m not going to say it. Neither are you. Promise?”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “I know,” she said, and reached up and kissed him. It was a kiss that felt at once too brief and yet endless, and for a moment they both felt what the promise meant, and that word was loneliness. Gaena turned and dived headlong into the sea.

  “I’ll be here tomorrow,” Makan said softly, but the sea made no answer.

  A Garden in Hell

  “Tradition says there are anywhere from two to one hundred and thirty-six separate Hells, all of which are an illusion. Which is rather sad, considering the number of souls in torment there.”

  —Dai Shi Johnson

  “This isn’t happening, you know,” the demon said to Hiroi just before the demon stabbed him. Hiroi didn’t really mind. This was, after all, Hell. It was supposed to hurt. Hiroi screamed when the red-faced demon pulled the jagged blade out, since that hurt even more. In a moment the blood dried and the wound closed and it was time to do it all again. How long had he suffered? Hiroi wasn’t certain. Besides, it was really difficult to concentrate when the lower half of one’s was on fire. Hiroi looked down at his burning limbs wistfully.

  “I suppose this isn’t real, either?” Hiroi asked.

  Despite his calm, Hiroi’s thoughts were racing. He didn’t remember the demon ever speaking to him before. Hiroi forced himself to look at his tormentor. The demon was about eight feet tall, bright red with stubby yellow horns on its massive forehead, and it carried a club of iron which, oddly enough, it never used.

  “No, but it is very depressing despite that,” the demon said, sitting for a moment on broken stone and resting from its work of torment. “You hardly notice your punishments now. I do this for your own good, you know.”

  “It hardly seems like a favor when you run that great rusting blade through my chest.”

  “Another error,” the demon said, and stabbed him again.

  For some time after that Hiroi rather lost interest in the conversation, though later the demon’s words would return to trouble him, even more than the fire or the jagged blade.

  I do this for your own good.

  It was nonsense, of course. The demon was toying with him with the same spirit and enthusiasm it used to drive its knife into him, that’s all.

  “Why are you telling me this? To what end? My karma brings me to Hell. There is no good or bad, it just is . . . to the extent that anything can be said to be. You don’t exist, demon, but neither do I. My suffering may be an illusion but it feels real. If all must be illusion, then what one feels is all that matters; it is pointless to try to change anything.”

  “I’m telling you this because you need to hear it. As for the rest, all is not illusion,” the demon said. “Who gave you such a notion?”

  “Besides the holy writings? You did.”

  The demon shook his head, looking disgusted. “I said that this wasn’t happening. I said that I wasn’t real, and that’s so. I didn’t say that nothing was real.”

  “The scriptures—”

  The demon waved one massively clawed hand in dismissal. “Yes, yes, I know all the words. ‘Life is an illusion.’ Hell is an illusion. Yet if all is illusion, then someone must be suffering that illusion. The only spirit great enough to contain all illusion is the Buddha. The Buddha has no illusions by definition. You see the contradiction?”

  “Well . . . yes,” Hiroi looked thoughtful, or at least as thoughtful as one could look with their nether regions on fire. “But if that’s true, if my internal essence is real but you aren’t and neither is Hell, then why can’t I put an end to this torment?”

  “Foolish question. It is your own need for correction that creates the Hell in which you now suffer in the first place. I’ll go away when you don’t need me anymore.”

  “In order to find the end, it would help to know where to start.”

  The demon sighed deeply. “I’m only a projection of your own necessity, but I can tell you this much: If you really want Hell to end, find out what, besides yourself, is real here. Pierce that much of the illusion on your own and maybe you will find the way out.”

  Nothing changed for some time. It was all very well for the demon to say that he should find what was real, but where was he to look? As far as the eye could see in all directions was nothing but smoking waste and desolation. What was the point of wandering anyway? Hiroi had tried to escape his tormentor, a few times in the early years, but that had never worked. Wherever he went, there was the demon, like his shadow. Which, if the demon was correct about its nature, made perfect sense. So where c
ould he go now?

  As was becoming his habit, he asked the demon this question, who merely shrugged. “Look anywhere you like. When your punishment is due I will find you, have no concern.”

  Hiroi sighed. “I wasn’t concerned, believe me.”

  He walked away from that place then. That place which had been witness to his torment for years almost past counting. This wasn’t like before, when he ran, frantic and fearful, through the wastes of Hell. This time he was not running. He was searching, though truth be told he hadn’t the first clue of what he was searching for.

  How will I know what is real when I see it?

  The problem was that, illusion or not, everything looked real, smelled real, felt real. The black sand, the poisonous smokes and vapors, the bare, dead trees and brambles, the jagged rocks. Even the demon, whose objective existence the creature itself denied, always looked very real, and his blade certainly felt real enough. The flames burning him looked and felt real, though he had grown accustomed enough to them to function. Which, Hiroi belatedly realized, was about the same time the demon and its long knife had appeared in the first place. Hiroi just shrugged, guessing that, before then, the creature had been content to let him burn.

  Or, perhaps, I was content to burn?

  Hiroi realized as he walked that Hell was, not surprisingly, rather black. The trees were not only dead but burnt to charcoal from the heat. The dirt under his feet was closer in consistency to sand and that, too, was black. All this was more or less what he was used to, but Hiroi was trying to pay attention as he walked, on the theory that, if there was anything in Hell that he hadn’t already seen, paying attention was the best way to spot it. As for the sand, Hiroi thought he’d seen black sand before, and had a sudden image of an ocean, but in another moment the memory seemed to blow away on the hot wind.

  Hiroi soon learned that he was wrong when he thought himself and his demon were the only creatures in Hell. As he walked he encountered other sinners paired with their demons, but they took no notice of him. Hiroi, for his part, studied them as thoroughly as discretion allowed. The only real difference he noted had to do with where the sinner was burning. Some people’s hands were burning. Others’ eye sockets were flaming holes and yes, there were some like Hiroi who were burning from the waist down.

  Punished for different things, I suppose.

  He did wonder a bit that anyone could get used to burning eyes, but the sinners in question seemed to go about their suffering more or less oblivious to the pain, just as he did. All in all, there didn’t seem anything unusual about any of that and, after a while, he tended to avoid them.

  Hiroi kept walking. He walked for so long, in fact, that he was beginning to wonder why he hadn’t seen his demon yet. Surely it was time for his next stabbing.

  Delay means anticipation, and there’s where fear comes in. Perhaps this is a new torture.

  Hiroi was growing tired of walking across hot sand when he came to a valley. He stood on the edge of one of the surrounding ridges, looking down. For the most part it didn’t look much different from the rest of Hell. There were a very few blackened trees, but mostly black rocks, and what looked like the same black sand as everywhere else.

  Yet there were differences. The sand was fairly flat at the bottom of the valley; doubtless there was some lee there from the blasting hot wind everywhere else that whipped the sand into dunes and troughs that made walking difficult. The landscape of the valley wasn’t just a little different—it was familiar. Again, it made him think of water, even though there was no water there. Try as he might, Hiroi could not grasp why that should be.

  Perhaps a better look would help.

  Hiroi trudged down the slope toward the valley’s floor, where the heat was merely stifling rather than the blast furnace roar he was used to. Plus, once he reached the valley floor, the walking was much easier. He wouldn’t go so far as to call the valley better so far as overall hellishness was concerned but it was definitely different. He stopped near a large round stone half buried in the sand and looked around. The more he looked the more convinced he was that he had seen something similar before. Yet the familiarity wasn’t in the valley as much as it was in the arrangement of rocks and sand on the valley floor, shielded as it was from the high winds elsewhere. There was a hint of serenity about it that seemed so out of place there and yet was, somehow, appropriate. Yet he still didn’t understand why it reminded him of the ocean.

  Where have I seen this before?

  The position of the larger rocks in front of him seemed familiar as well, but . . . wrong, somehow. He didn’t know what was wrong with the arrangement of rocks and sand and debris, only that it wasn’t quite right. Perhaps if he made a few changes? Hiroi smiled at the idea of changing Hell to suit him but, then again, why not? He decided to start with the stone beside him. It was very large and hard to move. Worse, of course, was that it was also very hot. He gasped, startled by the pain into dropping the stone. Hiroi blew on his blistered fingers, ruefully.

  You’d think I’d be used to pain by now.

  Granted, he wasn’t as used to pain in his hands specifically as he was to pain elsewhere, and no doubt that was what startled him. Hiroi shrugged. Nothing for it; he would simply have to get used to a new form of pain. He reached for the stone again.

  “Would you mind telling me what you are doing?”

  Hiroi looked up. A demon sat on top of heap of stones about twenty feet high, looking down on him. The demon’s head and hands were all that he could see; the rest of the creature was covered with fine silks and brocades fit for a prince. The face and hands were a rich green. Hiroi frowned. “Who are you?”

  “I am your demon,” said the demon.

  Hiroi shook his head. “My demon is red.”

  “Your demon was red,” the demon corrected firmly. “For one who has no objective reality, changing appearance is child’s play. Now I will be green.”

  “So why change?” Hiroi asked, but the demon just shrugged.

  “Why does one do anything? Because one chooses. There are rationales and excuses and theories, but they all come down to this in the end.”

  Hiroi shrugged in turn. “That explains nothing and everything, including why I choose to move this stone.” He took another grip on the rock. This time he was prepared for the burn and he did not drop his burden. He shifted it quickly and not very far, no more than three feet from its former position, then set it down again. The stone still formed a very rough triangle with two other large stones in the vicinity; all he had done was to change the angles slightly. He frowned.

  That’s closer . . .

  To what? He did not know, but he could not shake the feeling of familiarity. If anything, with this one slight change that feeling had gotten much stronger.

  “I didn’t ask ‘why,’ ” the demon said finally. “I asked what. What is the point of moving those stones? You have a purpose; I can tell.”

  Hiroi shrugged. “There’s something about the arrangement of stones here; it seemed close to something I’d seen before. I thought perhaps, with adjustments, this might jog my memory.”

  “You really don’t remember much of your life, do you?”

  Hiroi studied the stones. “A few scattered bits, and an image or two. The ocean. A woman’s face. Someone I knew, I think.”

  The demon considered this. “Clearly I am negligent in my duties.”

  “How so?”

  “This is Hell. You’re being punished. Where does the pointless arrangement of rocks in sand enter into this?”

  Hiroi shrugged again. “If what you said before is true and you are simply a manifestation of my own need for correction, how can you do anything at all except exactly what you should be doing? And if that is so, then it follows that I am doing exactly what I should be doing, including taking that walk and arranging stones in sand. For whatever reason.”

  The demon raised an eyebrow. “That is an interesting point. Let us both assume for the moment that you
r argument has some validity. That still doesn’t tell either of us what the true purpose of this activity is, or what end it will serve.”

  Hiroi sighed. “True enough.”

  “No matter. I have sorted it out. You could do the same, if you follow your premise to its natural conclusion.”

  “How so?”

  “I am an illusion, your punishment is an illusion. What follows from this?”

  Hiroi looked around. “Hell is also an illusion—we talked about this before. The fact this isn’t real doesn’t matter so long as it hurts and I can’t make it go away.”

  The demon laughed at him. It was several moments before the creature could compose itself enough to speak again. “Oh, Hiroi. You’re the only one who can make it go away. The Buddha himself cannot help you if you will not. Or do you expect the Goddess of Mercy herself, Kuan Shi Yin, to float down from the clouds and rescue you? No? Then you’ll have to do it yourself.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Then you are not ready. I will return when you are prepared to suffer in earnest.”

  Hiroi just stared at the creature. “I’m on fire. If this isn’t suffering, I’d like to know what is.”

  “Good, because you will.”

  The demon left him then. It was only much later that Hiroi realized the creature had not stabbed him. Not even once.

  Hiroi wasn’t certain how long it took to get the arrangement of stones correct, but he finally managed. He was sure of it. The stones matched perfectly with the image in his mind. Yet despite that, something wasn’t right. Or rather, Hiroi realized, something was missing. He clambered up on the nearby hill of stones that the demon had used earlier and peered down at his handiwork.

  Hiroi had first arranged the stones to his satisfaction and then set about removing all the other smaller stones and debris from the area. Now the three stones sat by themselves on a wide flat expanse of sand about thirty yards from the rocky hill. The image was evocative and, yes, captured that sense of familiarity that he had tried so hard to qualify since his first discovery of the valley. Yet it was still incomplete.