A Short Stay in Hell

by Steven L. Peck

  ~~~

  I AWOKE WHEN the light came on. Elliott was first to the bathroom, and I could hear the shower running. Larisa was still asleep. I drank from the drinking fountain and walked outside and asked for a glass of cold orange juice. I leaned over the railing and drank my juice, looking deep into the crevasse between the floors bracketing our side and the other opposite. I don’t think I’d ever seen anything so deep. Not even the Grand Canyon had seemed so vast. After a few minutes, Larisa joined me in staring over the side.

  “I used to be afraid of heights. But this looks even beyond my fear. It looks like it goes on forever,” she remarked.

  “Maybe it does.” (I was wrong of course. It does end. There is a bottom. But “forever” would have been a better word. “Forever and ever” would hardly have described it. “Infinity” is even too small a word to describe the vastness of the distance to the bottom. But I’ve stood upon the bottom floor. The human mind cannot comprehend what it took to reach, but I’ve been there.)

  For the first time since our arrival, Larissa and I walked over to the shelves of books and pulled one down. Each volume appeared to be identical on the outside. They were bound in light brown high-quality calfskin. The edges were gilded in bright gold, and the paper was a thick heavy bond – substantial and bright white, fibrous, and nicely stitched into the binding. Each page was a solid block of text. An ordinary book by all appearances – except the text was complete gibberish. A random splash of capital and lowercase characters, punctuation marks, and other characters like &, *, $, and #. Here is a line from the first page of the first book I picked up:

  Aj;kLJjppOjnfe7 ImNB2uyS@;jHnMBVF ghT/.hk%hKh’2jh< ,bYblZl@)m $’n@gD E#zB /,,]hqH

  Every page had a similar look.

  “These books are nothing but garbage,” Larisa said in a disgusted voice. “When I was looking at these, I was thinking about a lifetime spent reading great works of literature. Now I get it – this is Hell; an eternity surrounded by books, but they’re all nonsense.” She gave a sarcastic laugh and heaved the book over the railing.

  A man wandered over to us. “I see you’ve discovered the quality of our library.”

  “I can’t believe it,” I said, picking up another volume and staring at the textual salad of symbols.

  “My name is Bob, but my friends all called me Biscuit.”

  “How do you do … Biscuit?”

  I continued to pull books off the shelf and flip through them. I was having a hard time believing all of the books were just collections of random characters.

  The man calling himself Biscuit seemed mildly amused. I was pulling them off the shelf, paging rapidly through them and then, like Larisa, tossing them over the side. More people joined us, and soon a fair number of us were looking through books and tossing them over the side, most of them making the same sorts of comments.

  “I can’t believe it. Such nice books, and every one of them filled with nonsense.”

  “This isn’t right! Is it?”

  “This is Hell. This really is Hell.”

  One woman was laughing hysterically and just tossing books over the side. She wasn’t even looking at them.

  I have to admit I found a certain strange pleasure in heaving books over the side. It was a feeling akin to popping bubble-wrap. Taking a book of nonsense, tossing it over the rail, and watching it until it disappeared flapping wildly into the oblivion below gave me a strange satisfaction, a small sense of purpose. Only Biscuit refrained from helping the general effort to clean the shelves. He just sat there smiling, shaking his head.

  “I see,” he said to no one in particular. “We really are in the Library of Babel.”

  A woman standing next to me, watching our books fall like a pair of wounded ducks spiraling to the ground, inquired politely, “The Library of Babel?”

  “This is the Library of Babel,” he shouted. “We’re in it. Not like Borges described it, but this is it, the same idea.”

  Several people turned their attention to Biscuit, including me.

  “What’s the library of Babel?” another man asked, repeating the woman’s question.

  “Don’t you see?” Biscuit was fairly animated, and most of the people who had been launching books into the chasm had turned to listen to him.

  “It’s written on the sign with the rules outside the rest areas. It says this Hell is based on a story by Borges. I remember the story. Look, the books all end on page four hundred ten, just like the books in his story. And look at this. They’re all in blocks of” – here he started counting – “yes, forty lines, and I’ll bet there are” – he started counting again – “yes. Eighty characters per line, just as Borges described. Amazing. We’re in the Library of Babel.”

  Someone asked a third time, a little more impatiently than the first two inquiries, “What’s the Library of Babel?” Biscuit looked around him and saw that an audience of about fifty people now gave him its undivided attention.

  “Well,” he began in a lecturesome tone, “imagine a library that contains not just every book that has been written, but every book that could be written. I remember the story exactly. How strange. But the basic idea from Borges’s story is that the library contains every possible book. So somewhere in here is a book of all A’s, a book of all periods, or a book of semicolons, or B’s. Any letter. There’s a book that alternates A’s and B’s for its entire length, but most books are just a random collection of symbols.”

  “So there’s a book that’s half A’s and in the second half all B’s,” proposed one woman.

  “Yes. But more than that, every book ever written is there. And every book ever written is there backwards.”

  One man raised his hand like a student in a classroom, and Biscuit acknowledged him.

  “It can’t have every book,” the man said, tilting his head and looking ridiculous as he affected a knowing and wise demeanor. “Some books are longer than four hundred ten pages. Take War and Peace, for example.”

  He looked around, nodding his head trying to find someone to acknowledge his point.

  “No. Don’t you see?” Biscuit said. “War and Peace would be in multiple volumes.”

  “With blank pages after it ended, completing the last volume,” added the woman standing next to me.

  “Or with the life story of Leo Tolstoy at the end,” added another woman.

  “Both,” said Biscuit. “There’s even one with the history of Leo Tolstoy’s nose hair completing the volume. But most are going to be pure and utter nonsense – random characters, with no order. Mostly nonsense.”

  “So there’s a version of War and Peace with the main character named Fred instead of Pierre,” said a man to no one in particular.

  “And another where Mark Twain and Huck Finn join the war against Napoleon,” added another woman.

  “But mostly nonsense,” Biscuit added again softly.

  Everyone was silent a moment.

  “That’s what the sign out front means,” the speaker was my new friend Elliott. “We have to find our own life story to get out of here.”

  “In one or two volumes,” asked a man in despair, “or ten or twelve?”

  Biscuit continued almost to himself, “There’s a second-by-second account of our lives, probably in multiple volumes, a minute-by-minute account, an hour-by-hour, a day-by-day. There’s one that covers the events of our lives as viewed by our mothers, one by our fathers, one by our neighbors, one by our dogs. There must be thousands of our biographies here. Which one do they want, I wonder?”

  Everyone seemed stunned, thinking about the different volumes in the library.

  “You mean there’s a biography of everything and everyone in this library. There’s even a biography of the guppies in my fish tank?”

  “Yes. Anything that can be written is there. The history of your big toe as viewed from the perspective of your shoe is there. Anything you can imagine, anything you can picture being written is here is this library.” Biscuit seemed
to be astonishing even himself.

  “It must have billions and billions of books,” one woman said. “If there’s a biography for anyone who’s ever lived, and every guppy that ever lived, and every worm that ever lived, there must be billions and billions of books.”

  “Wouldn’t it be infinite?” said another man shakily.

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think so,” Biscuit said slowly. “If we have four hundred and ten pages, forty lines of eighty characters, and a finite number of characters, there’s a finite number of books I would think. But it’s large. Very large.”

  We were all silent at the thought of the task before us. In this library of mostly meaningless books there was a book that described our life story. We had to find that one book. It could take millions of years, I thought. (Millions of years. Ha!)

  Most of the people had lost interest in opening the books and had begun conversations in small groups. I fell in with Biscuit and a woman named Dolores. Biscuit had lived most of his life as a homeless schizophrenic. He earned the name Biscuit when he refused to give up two dinner rolls to a couple of policeman arresting him. He told them, “These are the brain and heart of the world. Were I to give them up, the world would die and waste away.” He spent his life believing the world was dying, because one of his cellmates had eaten them while he was asleep.

  Dolores had been a housewife married to a factory worker in Detroit. She raised four children and then opened a ceramics shop after they had grown and left home. Her life had been rich and happy. She died at her daughter’s house surrounded by those she loved.

  In both stories of my companions, their young looks contrasted with their sagacity and age. I had died young and never really felt I had matured. I remember my own father, a real man of the house, someone who knew what it was to be a man. He radiated confidence. I never felt like that. I felt as if I were an imposter all the time I was raising my kids. I felt lost and helpless. I was flying by the seat of my pants, always with a feeling I was not doing things right. Compared to my own father, I seemed completely clueless. My dad was still living when I died. I hope he ends up in a nice Hell.

  A nice Hell. I laughed at the thought. This wasn’t a bad place. It seemed like a tedious Hell, but there was plenty to eat, good company, and it sounded like after a while we would eventually get out.

  We three went off to a nearby kiosk. I found Elliott and Larisa there and introduced everyone.

  “I guess we’ve got our work cut out for us,” Elliott observed positively. “It’s too bad we’re starting the search in the middle. Maybe we should find where the library ends. You know, start at the beginning.”

  “It’s not a bad idea,” Biscuit said, “at least we wouldn’t accidently redo a floor or something.”

  Larisa smiled. “I’m still not convinced there’s not an infinity of books. How can there be a limit to the number of books that can be written?”

  Dolores and Elliott nodded in agreement. (I’ll have to admit I was a little skeptical myself, but as you’ll see, I eventually met someone who had calculated the number of books in the library. There is a finite number.)

  The clock was moving toward ten p.m., and I thought the lights would probably go out soon. I went over and ordered warm milk, and it appeared, piping hot, the way I like it. I chose the same bedroom and the same bed I had slept in the night before. My two friends did the same. No one else came in with us, and we had the room to ourselves. What creatures of habit we are. After only a few nights in Hell we had settled into a comfortable routine. As I drank my milk, the lights went out and that utter stillness returned. My thoughts were restless now, and I was in no mood for sleep. How far was it to the end of the hallway in which we lived? Was it further than a mile? What if it were a hundred miles? How many books would that be? What if it were a thousand? It wasn’t that far, surely.

  2

  THE FIRST WEEK IN HELL

  AS ALWAYS, THE BOOKS WE threw over the rail into the great chasm between the two great bookcases were restored to their proper place on the shelves the next morning. Every morning we leafed through more books in hopes of finding our story and then, after noting the consistent sea of random text, tirelessly heaved them over the side. It was getting discouraging. I had not found even a single sentence that made sense.

  However, a few days later, Biscuit started dancing and shouting with joy. He called us over and we all looked in envy when he showed us he had found something that made sense. It was the phrase “sack it.”

  “What does it mean?” Sam asked. (Sam was a short, quiet young man, who had formed a sort of clique with Elliott, Larisa, Biscuit, Dolores, and me.)

  Biscuit looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure. Let’s see, a sack is something you use to carry something in. Maybe it means I’m going to go somewhere soon and will need a sack.”

  “What makes you think it means anything …” I started to say, but I looked at Biscuit and he had begun to cry, then sob. Tears slid down his cheeks, and he smiled at us, nodding his head as if affirming something we could not understand. We all were a little surprised. Dolores softly put her arm around him, and he turned to hug her as he continued to weep.

  “I’m sorry,” he said through his tears, “it’s just that …” He broke off, then said, “When I was alive, I …” Finally, after another bout of weeping, he steadied himself, laughed at himself, and started again. “When I was alive on earth, as you know, I was homeless and chronically mentally ill. I had an old green army laundry bag that I carried everything in. It was a sack that held everything I owned. A couple of times at night I’ve woken up reaching for it like I used to. It was my most prized possession. I carried that sack for twenty-three years, until one day the bottom fell out. I couldn’t let it go even then. I hitchhiked to the Vietnam memorial and placed it on the monument right above a friend’s name.”

  There was a moment of silence as we considered this.

  “You were in Nam?” Elliott asked. Biscuit just nodded.

  “I was in the South Pacific in WWII. If you ask me that was more of a Hell than this giant bookshelf.”

  Dolores began telling a rather silly story of how a sack was significant in her life when she had carried one from an exclusive department store with her to school and one of the cool girls had been jealous and she and her friends had laughingly ripped it to smithereens.

  Within a few minutes we all found meaningful, or terrible, stories about sacks in our lives. I even shared a story about a sack I threw away at Christmastime with a fifty dollar check in it.

  Biscuit, though, took it as a sign that all would be well. And Dolores as a sign of comfort and hope.

  To be honest, I thought it was just a random word, but I didn’t say anything to the others. They seemed particularly moved by Biscuit’s story. He held on to the book all that day and took it to bed with him that night. Sure enough, because he’d held on to it, the book wasn’t returned to its place on the shelf in the morning. It was still in his arms when he woke up. All the rest of the week he carried it with him, much like the sack he once loved so much. After two days, he found even more meaning in the word. It turned out that “sack” was on page 345, on line 21. Which if you reverse the 21 makes 1 2 3 4 5 backward – sort of. The word “sack” was found starting on letter 27 of the line and ending on letter 30. Which are both divisible by 3, which if you multiply by the 2 and the 7 in 27 respectively, gives you 6 and 21. Now, since you still need to get a single digit, you divide the 21 by 3, which gives you 7 back, so now not only do you have 1 2 3 4 5, you have 6 and 7. Now go back to the 27 and divide by 3, so you get 9, and divide the 30 by 3, and you get what? 10. So then you have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10.

  “Now,” says Biscuit, “take the three and the zero in thirty and add them together, and you get three, which added to the last number in the first chain you found, which is five, gives you eight. So the numbers of the page, line, and character produce the numbers one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten.”
>
  Biscuit was beside himself. His first few days in Hell were ringing with meaning.

  “What does that mean?” I asked innocently enough, unsure of what finding the first ten cardinal numbers in such a convoluted fashion meant.

  Biscuit looked at me like a schoolmaster looks at an errant rapscallion.

  “Don’t you see? This gives us the number of years we’ll search before finding what we seek. Sack signifies that the thing that has the most meaning to us here, the book with our life story, will be found in ten years. It gives the times and seasons of our stay here. It might mean ten days or ten weeks, but I suspect given the magnitude of our task ten years is not unreasonable.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Dolores was not too happy with his interpretation. “Ten years? That’s a long time to stay in a library. I hope it’s days or weeks. My heavens, ten years. Here. We’ll all go batty.”

  ~~~

  THAT NIGHT IN the absolute silence and darkness I lay on my lonely bed thinking. Thinking about the length of the library. I liked the idea of finding the end of a floor – if just to confirm there was an end to these rows and rows of books. Then we could look for the bottom, or the top, and start a systematic search for our book. I made up my mind. After a week of being in this place, I also wanted to see how many people were here. I thought it strange we’d only found other white people, that all of us spoke English, and that all of us made reference only to things we all understood. As far as we had been able to gather from the group around our area, we had all died within sixty years of each other. I was curious if this held throughout the library.

  I suppose what I really wondered was whether my wife was hidden somewhere in the vast reaches of this building. Maybe she had lived out her life and died and come to this same strange place. Maybe I could find her.

  At some point I must have fallen asleep, because suddenly I found the lights coming back on, and the brightness of morning revealing our world and pushing back the abyss of darkness that made up our nights.