A Short Stay in Hell

by Steven L. Peck

  As the day came to a close, my thirst was unbearable. All my bones were aching. I fell asleep and dreamed of drinking. But no matter how much I drank in the dreams, the water did not seem to slake my thirst. My throat continued to ache, so I would try to drink more, but nothing would change. I woke up many times in the night so thirsty that was all I wanted. Why would God have structured this Hell such that every wound would be instantly healed in the morning, but only the kiosk would slake hunger and thirst?

  The next three days were a blur. My tongue was swollen in my mouth, and all my bones ached. I thought I heard people offering me water. At one point I thought Rachel was falling beside me carrying a large pitcher of orange juice, which she was trying to pass to me, but every time I reached for it she would drift out of reach. Sleeping, dreaming, awake all became confused. I could no longer see clearly, and everything was a blur. Finally I must have died of thirst, because I woke one morning feeling great. I was not thirsty. I could have used breakfast, but was no hungrier than I usually was in the morning. It felt wonderful after so many days of misery and discomfort.

  Still falling. Still flying past floors with occasional people, but they were getting sparser. Sometimes many floors would pass before I would see another group. How far down was the bottom? Shouldn’t I have reached it by now?

  I did not want to go through another cycle of dying of thirst. I decided to try to get back into the stacks. First I moved near the wall, putting my hands into my smock, and tried to slow myself by pushing my hands against the wall. It didn’t work. I only seemed to push myself away from the wall.

  I realized I was just going to have to superman onto the floor, which would require some pretty good horizontal speed because I would have to move horizontally into the eight-foot space between the railing and the ceiling of the floor above. So I had to move about two feet across during an eight-foot drop. I was moving way too fast for that, and even with my smock bowed into a wing framed by my arms I wasn’t getting that much horizontal direction. But I had to try, I knew, otherwise I would never learn how.

  I stretched and angled myself to try a glide. I was not doing too badly; I was flying right next to the railing, but was still falling too fast to get into that eight-foot span. I kicked out my leg nearest the railing and managed to get it inside. It hit the railing with such force that it felt like my leg had been ripped off, and sent me spinning. My leg was broken, and my femur had been torn from my hip. The tumbling did not help the pain. I had never been in that much pain in my life either on earth or in Hell. I went into shock and mercifully passed out. When I woke up later that afternoon, the pain was unbearable. I had to do something, so I maneuvered over to the railing and stuck my head out, hitting the railing as it flew past.

  The next morning I felt fine. All was healed, but I was still falling. I decided I would try again. I maneuvered myself next to the railing and tried to get as much of a horizontal vector as I could. This time I had a better plan. I kicked my leg out as before, and it hit and broke again, but as I spun around, I tried to throw my arms around the railing on the next floor down. Though it felt like they too were torn from the sockets, I swung my legs around and into the space between that floor and the one below. I got them both in and was going slowly enough that I actually hung from the railing by my knees like a child on a monkey bar for a moment or two. But I was not inside the floor, and with two broken arms and a broken leg, I dropped again into my fall. I did not have to wait long, though, before I banged my head on the railing to forget the pain.

  I tried the same thing again the next day, and almost got inside. If my back had not broken, I might have managed to land. The following day, by improving my horizontal direction and slowing myself down by using my arm and leg on the wall, I finally did it. I landed on the floor. I had broken both legs, both arms, and mercifully my neck. But lying there, with feeling only in my head, I could see I was on a floor. I had stopped falling. I would have danced if I had been able to feel my legs.

  I passed out but woke up late in the afternoon and found a man staring at me. I could tell I was lying in a pool of blood and must have looked a sight with my arms and legs lying twisted and broken in a heap. I could not speak, but I moved my jaw.

  He looked at me, clearly wondering what had happened. Then he asked kindly, “Were you beat up?”

  I could answer nothing. He saw my struggles and squatted beside me. “Blink twice for no and once for yes.”

  I blinked once.

  He scratched his head and said to himself, “How did he get into this mess? Did you do it to yourself?” he asked.

  I hesitated, not sure how to answer, but blinked twice and then blinked once.

  “Sort of?” he asked.

  I blinked once.

  I was starting to lose consciousness again, and he noticed I was starting to drift.

  “Would you like me to kill you?” he asked hurriedly before I slipped away.

  I managed a weak smile and blinked once.

  I woke up in a bed! I just stared at the ceiling and enjoyed the feeling of cozy security it gave me not to be falling. I was alone in the room and wondered where the man I had met yesterday had gone. I jumped out of bed and made for the kiosk. I had eggs, bacon, ham, pancakes, and a carafe of orange juice. It was marvelous. While I ate, I did not think of anything but the food and the sweet feel of liquid running down my throat. It had been so long since I’d had a chance to just sit and think. The Direites had killed me so frequently since my capture I’d forgotten what it was like to sit down to a meal and simply enjoy the pleasures of eating. After breakfast I looked around. I could not see a soul. The place was still and silent. I wondered how far I had traveled down. Miles and miles it must have been, but there was no way to know. I looked over the edge and was saddened to think I was going to have to continue my fall soon. I had to strike out for the bottom again to find Rachel. I knew she would be waiting for me at the other end of this horrible fall, and I had to find her. Still, I was not cheered at the prospect of falling again. It had been so hard to escape from the freefall that the thought of returning was unnerving.

  I idled around the rest of the day, opening a few books and tossing them over the side. They were all gibberish of course, but I kept going through the motions of hunting. After a nap and a late lunch, I was startled to see a man approaching. When he got closer, I could see it was the man who had put me out of my misery yesterday.

  “Hello,” I called as he neared. “Thank you for helping me yesterday.”

  He shrugged. “I expect you’d do the same for me.”

  “Of course,” I said and invited him to sit down by the kiosk. He was carrying a pillowcase with a book in it. He sat it carefully beside him and sat down with a sigh. He looked at me with a sidelong glance. “You’re a long way from anyone else. Are you searching for the first floor too?”

  I nodded vaguely. “Sort of, but I’m taking a break.” I learned he had been traveling downstairs for years. It had been over three weeks since he had met anyone.

  “In fact,” he said, “I continued on after I had moved you to the bed, but started back this morning after thinking about your condition. What happened to you? I was afraid there might be some of those strange violent gangs about.”

  When I explained about my escape, fall, and attempt to get on the shelf stacks he was doubly amazed.

  “I’ve often thought about making the jump to find the bottom. But I suppose I was never sure enough there was a bottom – you know, there always were those who said there was none.”

  He had never heard of the Direites, which I was glad to learn. Their influence had been so profound in my area of the library I was afraid it had spread everywhere. As I explained their views, he shook his head in wonder and sadness.

  “So you’re from way up there. You fell for what, seven, maybe ten days. At over a hundred twenty miles an hour. You’ve really covered some distance. I’m envious. That’s over thirty thousand miles. Wow, and the top
floor is higher than that. Who would have guessed?”

  I smiled. “I thought I would have hit the bottom before this, too.”

  As was the custom in Hell, we exchanged accounts of our lives on earth, our adventures in Hell, and such stories as passed the time with others in this endless afterlife. At dinner he introduced me to a delicious Korean dish, made of sliced beef, dumplings, and a ginger sauce. This was a dish I would have to remind myself of on occasion.

  “What book have you found?” I asked.

  He smiled and pulled it out. “I found it on the seven thousand three hundred twenty-second floor down from prime,” he said, which meant nothing to me as his prime was clearly not mine. He opened the book to a page he had marked with a napkin and handed it to me. I was stunned. It read,

  Breath, comes to me in bursts of joy. Stones retched out bloody worms, worn red with the passing of licking patterns of salt. Why signal wu8&xxKJOPOlns;kkk;

  I’d never read anything of such profound clarity in the library before. Tears rolled down my face, and I looked up at him in gratitude.

  “Wonderful isn’t it?” he said.

  “It’s two sentences that are grammatically correct! They make sense. This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. It’s poetry.” I was wild with joy. I hugged the book and kissed its cover and passed it reverently, if somewhat reluctantly, back to him.

  “Thank you,” I said. “You’ve given me some hope I haven’t had in a long time.”

  He nodded and without another word walked to the nearest stairwell and started down.

  He had told me there was a large group of people about three weeks journey straight up. Entering the same stairwell he had just started down, I started up.

  I had lots of time to think as I climbed up stairway after stairway, floor after floor. Mostly I thought about Rachel. I worried that after all this time she might still be falling. Or maybe she had escaped as I had, but how would I ever find her if she did? If I started falling again, I could fly past her at night and never find her again. Maybe I had already passed her? For the first time since my arrival I thought again of praying. I needed help far beyond what I could take control of, and prayer seemed the only measure I could take. But who would I pray to? This God of the Zoroastrians? A God who would send me to a place like this? What help would he be (if a he he was)? I didn’t know. I had no way to find out.

  I had a vague hope that the people thousands of miles below the groups I knew would be different from those I already knew (especially the Direites). How delighted I would be to meet someone from Africa or Asia. Someone with a different story to tell. The never-ending sameness of all those I knew somehow blended with the sameness of this Hell. The same rooms, the same railings, the same kiosks, the same bedrooms with the same bathrooms, the same signs, with the same rug, and the endless stacks of books all bound with unerring sameness, seemed to match the sameness of the people, all white, all American, all died between 1939 and 2043, the same outlooks, the same haircuts, the same maddening habits. Homogeneity everywhere, endlessly stretching into an eternity of monotony.

  I dared wonder if I might have come to a new part of the library. Perhaps this was where the Chinese were kept! Maybe I could meet an Arab from the fifteenth century! But I knew deep down it was not to be. The books were full of Roman letters, I reminded myself. But maybe I would find someone from Germany. But then there were no umlauts. From England? Maybe. But somehow I feared the defining point of this Hell was its unrelenting uniformity, its lack of variation from type. If there was a heaven at the end of this, it must be filled with great variety, perhaps a multiplicity of intelligent species spread across universes. Yes, heaven would be as full of difference as Hell was of sameness.

  I thought of the mountains and forests I remembered from my life as I climbed. I thought of the intricate structure of an ant’s cuticle. How delicate the song of a bird, nestled in the twisted branches of a towering pine, sounds spilling into the cool morning. I thought of the zippered feathers of a sparrow and of its patterned colors, the banded mottling of its breast, its tiny feet curled round the rough brown bark, cracked and furrowed, giving purchase to those tiny clawed feet. What I would have given even to see a cockroach in this place. It would be heralded as a treasure that could not be purchased with a king’s ransom. To see its six legs splaying from its thorax would have been a sight worth waiting for in a line a thousand years long. Songs would be written about its delicate multi-segmented antennae. Its wings would have inspired such poetry as to make people weep for decades at its telling.

  But here, deep in Hell, there was nothing to match such a wonder. Such splashes of variegation were denied us. Our attempts at music were nothing but a shadow of what we enjoyed on earth, but even more than music, we missed the natural sounds. The woosh of wind through the yellowing leaves of an oak on a cool day late in fall. The splashing of water over smooth stone in a tiny creek as it made its way down a steep mountain. Even the whistle of a train, or the screaming of a truck down the highway would have seemed like a symphony.

  The clomping of my feet climbing up the steps reminded me of the poverty of sensation we endured here. But on I climbed, dreaming of meeting a man or a woman from India who knew some songs I could not repeat ad nauseam. The ring of my feet striking the steps was becoming the summation of a sameness from which there was no escape. Nevertheless, I climbed on. And on. And on.

  It took me four weeks, but at last I ran into someone. I entered the floor exhausted, wobbled to the kiosk, and asked for glass of Gatorade. The drink was ice cold, and I downed it with relish. I noticed a man sitting in the middle of the stacks just looking down into the endless emptiness of the gulf.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He looked up, and I was shocked by the hollow sorrow on his face. His eyes were red and swollen, as if he had been crying for days, but now there was a coldness – a lostness more like – in his stricken, forsaken eyes that frightened me. He said nothing, but after looking at me blankly, he turned away and continued staring vacantly into the gulf.

  I decided to leave him and retired to the sleeping room, took a shower, and went to bed. The lights were not due off for an hour or so, but climbing all day was exhausting work.

  ~~~

  IN THE MORNING the man was still there. I ate a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and some toast, trying once again to engage the man in conversation, but he remained silent. I started up again. On about every fifth story up, I left the stairwell and peeked into the stacks, hoping I would run into more people. About ten that morning, I ran into a group of people. They were huddled in a small gathering, crying and talking in low sorrowful tones as if a great tragedy had occurred. As I approached I greeted them cautiously. One girl burst into tears. Everyone was mourning like I had never seen before in Hell.

  In a place where there is no real death, I had seen pain, anger, hatred, viciousness, blazing insane malicious rage, boredom often, frustration commonly, love, joy, contentment, excitement, sorrow over lost love, and a host of other emotions, but not this. Not this kind of mourning. Such a striking combination of loss and unalloyed despair I had not seen since my life on earth.

  “What’s wrong?” was all I could say.

  One of the men turned to me, his features a mask of grief.

  “Then you haven’t heard?”

  I gave a short version of my fall and landing in this part of the library.

  “You’ve come a long way,” was his only comment.

  I made some remark about my surprise that I had not hit the bottom yet. One of the women and two of the men burst into tears.

  I looked at the man who was speaking and asked as delicately as I could, “What happened?”

  He stared at me as if I had just arrived off a boat in a foreign land.

  “Master Took finished his calculations.” Again a round of tears broke out among the gathered group.

  He turned to me and said, “Maybe you should go see him yourself. I can’t talk abo
ut it anymore.” His voice cracked as he spoke, but he managed to add, “He’s about seventeen floors up. He’ll tell you what’s going on.”

  There was a stony silence as I backed away and started climbing again. It only took me a few minutes to dash up the seventeen floors.

  I walked into the hall and was stunned by the sorrow. People were weeping. Some seemed almost catatonic, staring into nothing, their faces a frozen rictus empty of expression. I saw a man and asked where I could find Mr. Took. He waved me down the hall. “Third flat down,” he said stiffly. I made my way through the group of sorrowing souls.

  Mr. Took was sitting on his bed, his head clutched in his hands.

  “Mr. Took?” I asked. He looked up. He didn’t answer at first, so I asked again.

  “What?” he said coldly.

  I explained I was new to the floor and was from about thirty thousand miles up.

  He shook his head and asked sarcastically, “So there are still only white, English-speaking Americans even up that high? I should have known. What do you want?” He seemed distant.

  I hesitated. “I was just wondering about the … sorrow.”

  He laughed at me and threw pages torn from a book at me. The margins were cluttered with charcoal equations, scratched out using a sharpened bone and something burnt from the kiosk.