A Short Stay in Hell

by Steven L. Peck

  “Look at these. It will answer your question. Look at them and weep, because they are going to tell you exactly what it means to be in this Hell. Look! Look!”

  I was frightened for a minute that he was going to get violent, and backed away, but he just sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands.

  I picked up the paper and stared blankly at the calculations, but I could not make heads or tails of them.

  “How long did you work on this?” I asked after his breathing had returned to normal. He lifted his head and looked at me.

  “What?”

  “You’ve been doing this a long time?”

  “I had an estimate in just a few minutes, but the exact answer has taken me awhile – I did not want to believe my guess.”

  “What are they, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  He let out a sigh. “I calculated the number of books in the library.” He stopped and looked at the papers he had thrown at me.

  “How many are there?” I asked. “Is there a finite number?” This was one of the most discussed questions in Hell. Our university, despite some people trained in calculus, had no one versed in probability theory. Had he really calculated the number of books, which was generally believed to be finite, but very large? I could feel my excitement growing. “How many?” I asked with a little more tension in my voice, realizing the implications of what I was asking.

  “Ninety-five raised to the one million three hundred twelve thousandth power.”

  “That’s a lot. Right?”

  “You don’t understand. In our old universe there were only ten raised to the seventy-eighth electrons.”

  “You mean there are more books in this library than there were electrons in our whole previous universe?”

  “Way more.” Then he added with an evil, mischievous look, “In fact, I’ve calculated the dimensions of the library. You say you’re from thirty thousand miles up? Did you wonder when you would hit the bottom?”

  I nodded slowly.

  He laughed bitterly. “Well if you were somewhere near the middle of Hell, you only have ten to the one million two hundred ninety-seven thousand three hundred seventy-seventh light years to go.” I’ll never forget his cold laugh. “You have over a million more orders of magnitude light-years to fall than there were electrons in our old universe.”

  I fell back. “Rachel!” I cried out. “I’ll never get to the bottom.”

  The man shook his head in disgust.

  “Oh. You’ll reach bottom,” he laughed bitterly, “just not for a very, very long time.”

  5

  THE DEEPEST ABYSS

  I WANDERED FOR MANY YEARS after that. I was paralyzed. I knew finally that Rachel and I would never meet again, but I hoped for a hundred years I would happen upon her one day. I played it out over and over in my mind. I would one day walk up to a kiosk and there she would be, ordering the hummus falafel she was so fond of. She would see me and jump up and throw her arms around me. I would never let go. Sometimes, in my mind, I found her sitting on the floor of the library pulling books off the shelves and looking at them. Other times I pictured her falling past me, shouting out my name. I would leap over the railing and, plunging like superman, catch her at last. We would embrace and never let go. We would never let go until we hit the bottom a zillion, zillion years later. But these were not to be. I’ve never found her. I know she dwells somewhere in this vast library; like the book of my life, she exists somewhere. Right now she is somewhere, probably alone like me, and somewhere she is undoubtedly pulling book after book off a shelf, scanning it, and tossing it aside. She probably, like me, keeps a book or two at her side. Perhaps one contains a novel she’s found, or a long and intricate poem. Maybe she has found her story and has left this Hell – no, like me through the eons, she has covered only a drop in the ocean of books that await our perusal.

  It seems odd to me now that after so long I still focus on a time so brief as to be but a fraction of an instant in the time I will be here, but so powerfully has that instant rooted into me that I hold onto it with a hopeless desperation. Ages of universes pass while I look at books of nonsense, yet I think on and on of a love so far in the past it is incomprehensible to believe it was even real. What is love that it has such power? Whatever it is, it seems unlikely this God who placed me here knows anything about it. If it loved me in the least, could it inflict what it has upon me? Who can understand? Once I feared to say such things, dreading a worse punishment. But what worse fate could there be? To remember love and know it is unattainable? To know love wanders somewhere light-years and light-years distant, ever knowing it is forever out of reach? Forever hidden? So I pick up another book. Open it. See a page of random characters. Toss it over the edge. Pick up another. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat … on and on the dots signify. On and on I go, light-year after light-year, eon after eon …

  I wandered for hundreds of years. Climbing, descending, climbing. I made some friends, took some lovers, fought a few people, protected others. I am glad to say I never ran into another group like the evil one that took Rachel from me. Yet I was never the same. My loves did not run as deep and rarely lasted over a year or two. So one morning I jumped. There was nothing more to do but find the bottom and start the search for my story in earnest. I would have to fall an eternity of light years. So I ordered a lamb shank from the kiosk, fashioned a bone knife and tied it on my arm with a strip of cloth torn from my robe, and jumped.

  For eons I fell. Every morning I awoke, plunged the knife into my neck, and awoke the next morning only to do the same again. Over and over, every day. Sometimes I would stay awake for an hour or so, but then boredom would set in and I would use the bone knife again.

  Then came centuries of agonizing thought. I knew I had not even fallen a light-year yet. I had googols and googols of light-years to go. There is a despair that goes deeper than existence; it runs to the marrow of consciousness, to the seat of the soul. Could I keep living like this forever? How could I continue existing in this Hell? And yet there was no choice. Existence goes on and on here. Finite does not mean much if you can’t tell any practical difference between it and infinite. Every morning the despair gripped me, a cold despair that reached inside, creating a catatonic numbness. There was a vague feeling of falling, of getting hungry and having a thirst beyond reason, but it seemed distant. Far away. And for the first time since my arrival I lost awareness of the passing of days. Of how long I fell I still have no memory. The unforgettableness of this Hell was suspended and in this numbing madness I plummeted downward. How many eons passed I cannot guess. But coming out of this numbness was slow. I was more like a vegetable than a person – with my consciousness only a shadow of self-awareness, only a dim sense of qualia penetrated my mental haze. I ceased to think, to perceive. I was no more aware of my existence than a snail or even an amoeba might be.

  Finally, slowly, I gained a measure of lucidity and decided to end my fall. It took me thirty-two attempts, but finally I woke up in the familiar halls of the library. Instinctively, still hoping for some luck, I pulled one of the books off the shelf – a splash of nonsense of course.

  I turned my attention to the kiosk. I ordered potatoes and ice cream. Fairly pedestrian fare, but I was hungry.

  I’m skipping details now – there is little more of interest to tell, but for the next hundred and forty-four years I wandered the stacks. I knew at some point I would begin the fall again, but for a long time I just wanted to find something. I did find this:

  catch trees as windy dots

  It was early in the morning when I saw someone fall past me. I was lonely. So lonely. Of course, this far down in the library I had met no one, so when I saw the body fall past me, I leapt over the railing immediately.

  She was not hard to catch. She was tumbling dead, and I was rocketing down like a bullet – arms held close at my side in a head-first dive. When, after the short chase, I had her dead body in my arms, I wept like a baby. She was so be
autiful! Like an angel. All day I stroked her hair and hugged her and wept with her dead in my arms. She was missing one arm and one leg. She must have been trying to get back on the stacks. She had a bone knife tied to her wrist. (Of course – how many design solutions were there to escape time’s demands in this place?) I used it to cut strips of cloth from my smock and bound her to me. I secured her remaining leg to mine, then bound her torso to my waist. I hoped this would keep us from twisting away from each other when the hour before dawn stole our consciousness. I even prayed, I think.

  In the morning we awoke at the same time. She stared at me for only a second before throwing her arms around me and holding on tight. I held on and wept with her. She pulled her head back and looked at me.

  “Are you real?” she asked in wonder.

  I could not answer. I just cried and held her closer. She responded in kind.

  She tried again. “I’d given up.”

  I could only nod. Then I squeaked out a feeble “me too.” There was no question what we meant.

  Her name was Wand. Little else mattered. We did not exchange stories. We just clung to each other as only the lonely and lost damned can understand. We planned our entering the stacks very carefully. We did not want to lose each other, so we fell for several days, working out a plan to stay together. We discovered that by holding hands like a couple of crabs locked in combat, we could begin to rotate. By pulling and pushing we could engineer a spin, turning like a maple seedpod. By escalating the rotating rhythm, like when you try to rise higher and higher in a child’s playground swing by pumping your legs, we were able to spin faster and faster.

  She had had a good deal of trouble entering the stacks from a free fall – as she tended not to have the mass needed to crash hard enough into the side and wrap an appendage over the railing. She’d succeeded only twice in even coming close to breaking her fall and she had last been killed when I found her on her 783rd try. I thought of Rachel. How many times had she tried?

  The plan was to spin fast enough that when I let go, she would have enough horizontal momentum to shoot over the railing and into the stacks before she crashed. If she failed, I would catch her and tie us together and we would try again the next day. When she finally succeeded, I would try to crash as quickly as possible and race up to meet her.

  “It might take me a year to climb back up to you,” I said.

  “I’ll wait a hundred years if I have to,” she said, smiling mischievously, and kissed me hard on the mouth.

  We made love twice, before making our attempt. We had both fallen so often and so long that we were like creatures of the air, and it seemed as natural as in a bed. For a day I glimpsed what heaven must be like.

  We started spinning, ready to make our attempt at the stacks. I’d never gone so fast in my life. The library was spinning around me so quickly I thought I could not hold on any longer, but we did and we continued to pump our arms back and forth, generating more and more angular momentum. I’m not sure whether I released her or she was torn from my grasp by the centripetal force, but we flew apart. It worked too well. She flew away from me like a bullet. I hit the railing with such force I nearly lost consciousness, but luckily only broke my hip and back. To my delight as I slid away from the railing into another free fall I saw she had made it onto the stacks – first try! She was not killed either and she managed a smile from the floor of the hall as I slipped into unconsciousness.

  I awoke the next morning and immediately tried crashing into the side. It was foolish to hurry and not to prepare better, and I only managed to lose an arm and consciousness. The next day I thought through my plan more carefully before executing it. I almost made it back into the stacks on the first try, but lost a bit of balance on my approach, and when I fell away could not hook my legs over the railing. I wasn’t killed, so I tried again a little later in the afternoon, but was in so much pain from the morning’s attempt, it was hopeless. I was getting anxious by this point; I figured I was falling about 2,880 miles a day, 62,000 flights of stairs, and every day I wasted I was adding about three months of climbing. The next day I was highly motivated and gave it all I had. I careened feet-first into the stacks. My legs caught on the bar and tore from their sockets, but it slowed me enough to be able to backflip so I could hook my arms on the next floor’s railing and hold on. With a Herculean effort of will, I pulled my remaining torso over the rail.

  “I’m coming, Wand,” I said, beaming brightly as I died.

  The next day I barreled up the stairs. I flew. I bound up two steps at a time. I was relentless. After the first month, even though I knew I had not climbed nearly high enough, I shouted her name on every floor. My every thought was of finding her, and I would run long after the lights went out, until I passed out in that strange hour before dawn when sleep can’t be helped and all things are repaired and made right and new in Hell.

  The days passed in a dream. I pictured our reunion again and again, played it out in my mind over and over until I’d almost worn a groove in my thoughts, so deep that it seemed the only thing I could think of was our reunion. Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair.

  I never found her. I don’t know what happened. I searched everywhere she could have been. I called her name relentlessly, but she was gone. I never found her. I continued down after a score of millennia of wandering, opening an occasional book, but mostly looking for her. Of Wand I found no trace. Now I wonder if our meeting was real. Perhaps it was a dream? Maybe my memory of her getting into the stacks was an illusion, and she plunged light-years below me. She is gone. That at least is clear.

  All hope is gone also. All hope for anything has vanished – meeting a person, finding a book, discovering some hidden way out. So much time has passed, what is left to say? All variety is lost, and billions of years spent searching through books has left me a poor conversationalist. I could tell you of my fall to the bottom – the starving and dying over and over in endless cycles of pain and forgetfulness. I could tell you of starting my search in earnest from the bottom floor. Of moving slowly up light years and light years of stairs. Of opening books beyond count. I could tell you of occasionally, every eon, meeting a person, with whom I might stay for a billion years. But what of it? After a billion years there is nothing left to say, and you wander apart, uncaring in the end. The hope of a human relationship no longer carries any depth or weight for me, and all meaning has faded long ago into an endless grey nothingness. Now the search is all that matters. I know there will come a time when I find my book, but it is far in the future. And I know without doubt that it will not be today. Yet a strange hope remains. A hope that somehow, something, God, the demon, Ahura Mazda, someone, will see I’m trying. I’m really trying, and that will be enough.

  APPENDIX

  THE LIBRARY OF BABEL CONTAINS all the books of a certain size that can be written. I assume all the characters on a standard keyboard and that each book (as described in the original story by Jorge Luis Borges) is 410 pages long with 40 lines of 80 characters on each page. So the total number of characters in the book is:

  410 * 40 * 30 = 1,312,000

  With about 95 possible characters on a standard keyboard, that implies that the number of possible books is 951,312,000, a rather large number when one considers that there are only (according to Arthur Eddington [1882–1944]) 1.580 electrons in the universe. Now, assuming the books are about 1.5 inches thick and take about 1.5 feet to shelve vertically, figuring about 8 shelves 200 feet long and about 100 square feet of living space, the width and breath of the library (given two shelves, one for each side of the library) is about 7.161,297,369 light-years wide and deep.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  STEVEN L. PECK IS AN evolutionary ecologist and professor of the philosophy and history of science. He is the author of a previous novel, The Scholar of Moab (Torrey House Press, 2011), and a for
thcoming young adult novel, Spear from the Wealdend’s Tree (Cedar Fort Press). His poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Dialogue, Bellowing Ark, Irreantum, and Red Rock Review. In 2011 he was nominated for the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award, and his writing has been recognized through honors and prizes including the Mayhew Short Fiction Contest and the Eugene England Memorial Essay Contest. His scientific work has appeared in American Naturalist, Newsweek, Evolution, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Biological Theory, Agriculture and Human Values, and Biology & Philosophy, and he co-edited a volume on environmental stewardship.

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  THE BEGINNING

  THE FIRST WEEK IN HELL

  YEAR 102: THE MOST SIGNIFICANT TEXT

  YEAR 1145: THE GREAT LOSS

  THE DEEPEST ABYSS

  APPENDIX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR