Our little gang of five typically gathered at the kiosk in the morning, where the others would have a cup of coffee. I took my first cup ever on this morning. Being a Mormon, I had never even tasted coffee, let alone drunk a whole cupful. How could that matter now? Zoroastrianism had been shown true, and I was in a Hell that had no prohibitions against it. Still, it was hard. Lifelong habits are not easily broken. Keeping the Word of Wisdom, as we Mormons called our health code, had always been taken as a sign of my righteousness, my worthiness to attend the holy temple, and to participate fully in the church. Even here in Hell, after a lifetime of keeping the Word of Wisdom, I was having an ugly time deciding whether to try a cup.
“This is my first cup of coffee,” I announced somewhat apprehensively to the usual gang. “Any suggestions?”
It started a small argument when Biscuit suggested black so I could experience the taste in its full and unadulterated purity. Larisa insisted I ease into it. “Don’t you remember how nasty it was the first time you tasted it? Let’s not scare him away for heaven’s sake.”
Larisa prevailed, and I ordered a mild mocha. Everyone watched, holding their breaths as I brought the small white cup to my lips and took a sip of the rich brown liquid. It tasted like crap. The most bitter and disappointed taste I had ever encountered. Everyone laughed and patted me on the back. They all congratulated the Mormon boy for breaking with his past.
I finished the cup, but I felt like I had betrayed something deep within me. Only a little over a week in Hell and I had abandoned a lifelong belief. What if this was just some sort of trial God had arranged to test my backbone? What if this Hell was really all a ruse concocted by God to see what I was made of? But no, there was something real and final about this Hell. I can’t describe it, but there was a deep sense that this was more real than anything I had experienced on earth. The difference in the quality of consciousness between dreaming and being awake was close to the difference between our old earth life and the one there. This reality carried with it a profound sense of itself – a deep sense that this Hell was indeed just what it seemed to be. There was a truth in it that denied second-guessing. I really felt and now believed Zoroastrianism was the one true religion and I was truly and undeniably in Hell, and would be here until I found a way out. Also – and this seemed odd to me – just as I believed in the physical reality presented to me, I believed I would find the book about my life I was expected to find and one day slip it into the appointed slot and be free. I wondered why I believed it all. But I clearly did.
Even when I tried to formulate doubts about my experience, I found I was only playing with doubting. I really believed I was where the demon said I was. I was in Hell and there was no denying it. It was as if my entire consciousness, like a computer program, now had a script imposed on it compelling me to believe this experience was an actuality that brooked no argument. It was as if my neural wiring had been rewritten in accordance with a modified version of Descartes’s famous dictum, “I think therefore I am.” Now it was “I think I am in Hell, therefore I am.”
Despite this perception of reality, I felt strangely myself as well. I was still the Mormon, still the geologist, still as curious; I still loved my wife and missed my children terribly. I thought about them all the time and wondered what they were doing right then. I wondered if “right then” even made sense. Did time in Hell work the same as time on earth? Did my week there take a week on earth? Did it take a thousand years? Or twenty nanoseconds? Was there no frame of reference? Of course not, I thought, there are people here who died over fifty years ago, and I’d met a woman who died thirty years after me. Yet here the days passed as I remembered them. Time on the large clock seemed to sweep through a second the same way it did on clocks back on earth.
While I was thinking about this, Biscuit tried to get some cigarettes. They did not come. He then tried a shot of whiskey, which, to his delight, appeared in a shot glass in the kiosk. He tossed it down with a bright eye and asked for another.
“It’s the real thing,” he declared as he knocked back the second. He asked for a third and it came. Strangely, after six or seven there still seemed to be no effect on him. After twenty, he was getting frustrated.
“It’s all fake,” he declared. Suddenly his eyes lost their focus, and he staggered against the rail.
“He’s plastered,” Dolores giggled.
“Um not plasssserd,” he slurred. “One more for the rood,” he coaxed the kiosk, and it gave him one. “Hell, gife mme a boodle.”
The kiosk gave him a bottle, and he opened it and started chugging.
It wasn’t long before others joined in the fun. Even people across the gulf saw what was going on over on our side and started rounds of drinks.
This was too much for me. Drinking? I was still reeling from ordering an “evil” cup of coffee. So as everyone began drinking, I walked away. For the last week or so I had not ventured much further than a couple hundred yards or so from the bedroom near where I had appeared. But now I just wanted to get away. People were carrying large steins of beer and telling me to drink up. It was Hellfest. I could not. So I started to run down the hall. Always a good runner when I was young, I found my new youthful body was in wonderful shape. I would guess I was doing about a six-and-a-half-minute mile and felt like I could do it forever.
So I ran. I ran for a little over three hours. (The strange thing in Hell is, you always know what time it is. The great clocks are always visible.) Along the way, I met others like myself, but, strangely, they were all white and all spoke English with an American accent as they waved or gave a short greeting. After a brief rest and a little orange juice I started again. I was determined to answer the question of how large the library was by finding the end of the floor I was on. It could not be too far. Maybe a hundred miles or so. If I ran, say, eight miles in an hour that would put me at about sixty-four miles a day.
So on I ran. I ran past people I did not know, past the endless stacks of books, bedrooms, and kiosks. By about six p.m. I was starting to tire and stopped to rest. The people gathered around as I came to a sweaty stop near where they were gathered talking quietly. I introduced myself and told them what I was doing. They seemed excited about the project and told me I could stay in their bedroom. I was a little disturbed that they thought it was “theirs,” because I recognized that in searching for our books we were going to have to move around. I slipped away to take a quick shower and took one of the robes lying on one of the beds. I paused for a moment, hoping I had not offended anyone by co-opting their space.
I knew, however, that sometime during the day, at some point when everyone had left the bedrooms, all the beds would be made, bathrooms cleaned, and a clean robe laid on the bed with a new pair of slippers. Any dirty towels on the floors would be replaced and all would be tidied up. But being new to this area of the library it was impossible for me to tell if any of the beds had been claimed, so I just grabbed one.
I walked back out and held what I would learn to call the usual conversation. Who I was. Where I had lived my life. What wonderful things I had accomplished. The things that had been left undone. Who I missed and what I should have done differently and, finally, how I died.
At about 9:50 p.m., I went into the bedroom and asked where I should sleep. In this room, it turned out only two of the bunks were claimed. I was so tired from the run that I curled up and went to sleep. As soon as the lights were on in the morning, I was running again.
On and on, from one day to another, I ran. I started counting my paces and timing myself, and just as I’d guessed, I was doing a little under seven minutes a mile – not a record pace, but fast enough. A week went by and there seemed to be no end to this corridor. Sometimes I leaned far out over the rail and looked to the vanishing point to see if I could get a hint of the end of the corridor. Sometimes I thought I could see it, but it never appeared, and really I could not see anything but a vanishing point far in the distance. Straight on the shelves ran
until they disappeared into a tiny point that never changed, never gave a hint that I was approaching an end. For three weeks I ran, covering I estimate about fourteen hundred miles, and nothing ever changed.
I began to think how strange it seemed that I never met a single person of color. Not an Asian, not a black person, not a Hispanic, not anything but a sea of white American Caucasians. Was there no diversity in Hell? What did this endless repetition of sameness and of uniformity in people and surroundings mean?
In the third week I quit. I felt like this was purposeless. There seemed to be no end. What if there wasn’t an end? What if Dolores was right? What if there was an infinite number of books, what if there really was no end? Suddenly, I missed my new friends. I had only known them a little over a week, but I’d formed a bond with them and, out here, I had not met anyone else I’d become so attached to. I wanted to see them and talk to them. I wanted to hear Biscuit talk about his sack. I wanted to listen to Larisa laugh.
I ran back. It took me almost as long, but I ran with a new intensity. I wanted to find my friends again. I hardly said anything to anyone on the way back. All I could think about was finding a face I knew.
And suddenly there they were. And sober, too. (I’d entertained a fear they would still be sloshing drunk.) What a reunion. They had wondered desperately what had happened to me. No one could much remember the day through the fog of the alcohol. When I left, some wondered if I had gotten drunk and thrown myself over the side.
Now that I was back, no one appeared to be much interested in binge drinking. Addictions are not possible in Hell. No one here seemed to have any more than a mild psychological attraction to things. My little gang had decided to drink only once a week and keep it moderate. I was glad to hear it.
I also learned something interesting. Apparently a man named Jed had drunk three quarts of vodka and died.
“He was dead as a doornail,” a girl named Brenda, who had joined the group, said. “I didn’t drink that much, and when I found him he wasn’t breathing. He was completely dead.” She had gotten some help and moved him out of the way. They thought about tossing his body over the side, but decided they had better consult with the others. The next day there he was. Eating pancakes like nothing had happened.
“That was the weird thing,” Biscuit said. “When we woke up in the morning, we all felt great. No hangover, nothing. It was like the day was just as new as our first day here. It’s strange here. I wouldn’t mind a smoke or another drink, but I don’t need a smoke or a drink like I did on earth. All those cravings are controllable.”
I was a bit of a celebrity. I had traveled thousands of miles, and everyone wanted to hear my story. The infuriating thing was, there was really nothing to tell. Yes, it’s the same as it is here. The people are all white, speak English, and seem to be pretty much the same as us. For a thousand miles, I found everything along the way was the same as here. There were people living as far down and as far up I as I could see, and it never changed.
One man, a newcomer I did not recognize, said, “There’s only one thing that explains it – the rest of you aren’t real – mere creations like the books. My soul is probably in a vat somewhere being pumped full of sensations. You, you, and you,” he said, pointing at three of us, “are nothing more than input signals to a single consciousness swimming in a God-created void.”
We looked at one another and nodded. We could not refute it, but I knew I was real and assumed everyone else there was too. We turned away from him.
One young man paused and started asking me about the density of the people in the side rooms. “How many people were staying in the rooms as you traveled along?”
“About the same as here, three or four people in a room, about three empty beds everywhere I went,” I answered.
“It seems strange,” he said, the lines in his forehead narrowing. “Why do you suppose they didn’t try to pack us in more, or spread us out more? Why a density of three or four?”
A woman named Betty seemed genuinely depressed. “A thousand miles of books? How many are here? This is going to take forever. I’ve looked through thousands of books already and I haven’t even found a single phrase like Biscuit’s ‘sack it.’ How are we supposed to find a whole life story?”
Betty struck me as pretty, with long, straight red hair that fell around her shoulders. Her youth drew me in a way that surprised and delighted me. I was in a bit of a tizzy. I’d only been away from my wife for a month, but I felt a strong attraction to Betty. Although sexual in part, it seemed purer than that. I did not remember her from before I left on my run.
I answered a few more questions about my trip. I think everyone was surprised I did not find the hall’s end, that I gave up after going so far, and that it was all the same wherever we went. A couple of fellows from downstairs who had come up to hear about my trip were downright hostile and implied I had made the whole story up.
“Go yourself,” I shrugged at them, and they said bitterly they would. I think everyone was a little disappointed that the size of this Hell was much bigger than people imagined.
As we began to scatter to our own kiosks, I asked Betty if she was eating alone, and if so, could I join her. She seemed sort of surprised at my request, but pleasantly consented to join me for a meal. We walked awkwardly over to the kiosk.
“What would you like?” I asked innocently.
She seemed amused. “Is this a date?”
I stammered and muttered something about being a married man.
“Look at the sign on the wall. You’re not married anymore,” she said, grinning from ear to ear. She looked radiant, like an angel, or a Greek goddess. I just stared at her.
“Oh yeah,” I mumbled, but she was taking my breath away with every word she said. I had to quit looking at her. I knew I was staring and was embarrassed and ashamed. I couldn’t help it.
“I’ll take a tuna salad,” she finally said, adding, “with romaine lettuce.”
I ordered for her and passed the salad to her as it came out of the device. I asked for fish and chips, and we carried our plates over to the middle of the nearest row of books and sat down with our legs dangling over the side. We ate in silence for a few bites, making a comment or two on how good the food was here in Hell. She was curious about me and I chattered away until we finished the ice cream sundaes we had ordered after tossing the remnants of our meals over the side. I told her about my Mormon mission in Maine. I told her about getting my master’s degree in geology. I told her about raising my children, and of course I told her about my dying.
She was a polite listener and paused occasionally to ask me questions about this or that aspect of my narrative.
Finally, I asked her about herself. She looked at me shyly. “I don’t know how to tell my life. It was sometimes a good life, sometimes it was not – mostly not. I grew up poor in Mississippi, near Tupelo not far from the banks of the big river. My father was nothing but hate embodied. He hated my mama. He hated me and my sister. He hated my brother most of all. He weren’t the kind to beat or mistreat us, but he never said a kind word when a miserable one would do. He didn’t even shout much. Just ignored us. Now, Mama he would beat. She was a small woman and if things weren’t the way he liked them he would take her over his knee like she was a child and beat her black and blue with a belt.
“One day we woke up and papa was gone. Just like that. One day he just didn’t come down for breakfast, and that was that. Mama never said a word where he went, but just went on with her work, washing clothes for folk like nothing had changed. She did sing a bit more after he was gone, but that was about it.
“In high school I got pregnant with my history teacher’s child. He wanted nothing to do with it and told me he would kill me and the baby if I told whose it was, so I never did. The baby got taken away shortly after it was born because I kept writing bad checks. So they took the baby and put him up for adoption. I was in prison for only six months but when I got out no one would t
ell me where my baby was.
“So about then the war was starting, and I heard there were jobs up North for women, so I headed up there. There I met my husband of fifty-two years. The best man on earth. As good and kind as my papa was mean. We raised four daughters and a boy. All of them went on to college; every one of the girls became nurses, and the boy came back to take over my husband’s lumber mill. My husband never had a sick day in his life, and when he died I thought my guts had been ripped out and thrown under a herd of buffalo. I thought I could never live or love again. But I did. I outlived two more husbands. Good men both, but no equal to my Jonathan …”
She trailed off, and I was silent awhile. My lust seemed to have disappeared as she became a real person and not just a red-headed object with a nice face. I still was not used to the incongruity of this twenty-something young lady next to me talking like a ninety-eight-year-old great-grandmother.
“Do you ever think about meeting him here in Hell?” I asked. She looked at me with large wet eyes and nodded.
“Me too,” I said. “I think any day she’ll come walking up to me and say, ‘Hi babe,’ and …” I let it go.
We sat awhile stirring our sundaes and then threw the dishes into the hole. We knew if we left them out in the morning they would be gone, so why not enjoy the thrill of watching them fall into nothingness?
I spent my first two years in Hell with Betty. We had a fun time, but it turned out that other than our night activities we did not have much in common.
It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I’d been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you’d never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle. I still remember the deep sense of loss. The pain almost killed me. If it hadn’t been for Betty I might have jumped – but then where would I go? I now know, of course.
A Short Stay in Hell Page 4