Just to See Hell

by Chandler Morrison

  The night had grown cool, and Jesus’ skin prickled with the chill as he tried to keep up with the devil’s brisk pace. They were headed down Jubilee Street towards its easternmost end, where it dead-ended into an abandoned steelyard. About a half mile before the steelyard, though, was the Bad Seed. It had a reputation for being the “divest dive bar in the Cleveland area”, and it happened to be the devil’s favorite watering hole when slumming around in the likes of a town such as Millhaven.

  “You’ll love it,” Lucifer was saying to Jesus, tossing his cigarette into the gutter and lighting another without breaking stride. Jesus was noticing that their surroundings were becoming more derelict, and the brightly-lit establishments had been replaced by boarded-up houses and dark storefronts either closed for the evening or out of business entirely. “The atmosphere in there is just so sordid and grungy…it’s exactly the way a dive bar is supposed to feel, unlike all the fucking imitations that boast the adjective just because the bathrooms aren’t clean or the lighting is for shit. When I go into a quote-dive-bar-unquote, I want to feel like I’m about to get roofied or catch an STD just from sitting in one of the booths.”

  “That…doesn’t sound like my idea of fun.”

  “You didn’t think drugs, sex, and drinking sounded like fun earlier, though, did you?”

  “Point taken,” Jesus conceded. He was too worn out to argue. He wasn’t sure if it was the sex that had drained his energy, or just the weight of mental exhaustion from the day’s revelations, but he felt more and more tired by the moment. Walking was becoming increasingly laborious, and the ecstatic joy he’d felt back at the club had left him at some unknown time between then and now. His heart was still racing breathlessly along in his chest, but its rapidity felt in stark contrast to the lethargy plaguing the rest of his body. Something was wrong, he was sure of it, but he didn’t want to tell Lucifer for fear of sounding paranoid or foolish.

  “You’re coming down,” the devil said with a twitch of a smile, sparing Jesus the need to say anything, after all. “Badly, too. That tends to happen with coke.”

  “It’s awful,” Jesus complained, clutching at his chest.

  “Oh, no doubt. Worry not, though; the guy who runs the Bad Seed is a charming old junkie named Nick, who against-all-odds just turned one hundred, as a matter of fact, and he’ll surely have something to make the crash more bearable.”

  “I don’t know that more drugs is the answer to this problem.”

  The devil tsked and shook his head. “More drugs is the answer to every problem.”

  Jesus had, at this point, learned not to argue with his companion (friend? mentor? lover?), for everything he had held to an esteem of truth had been proven invariably false, so he fancied it wiser to just let the devil take the reins and see what happened.

  “Almost there,” Lucifer said, cigarette clamped between his too-white teeth. “Please, play it cool, for both our sakes. The folks on this side of town tend to be cut from a cloth far coarser than your saintly silk or satin or whatever the fuck it is they garb you with up there these days.”

  Jesus started to retort defensively, but was too weary and crestfallen to put up any real fight, so he capitulated and said, “Silk. We usually wear silk.”

  Satan scoffed. “Figures. Pampered fucks. But anyway, just try to take it easy. You’re shaking like a goddamn dog. They’re not going to take you seriously if they think you can’t handle your drugs.”

  “I can’t handle them,” Jesus whined. “This is so horrible. Everything is so bleak and miserable and hopeless. All the color is gone from the world. I feel completely…”

  “Oh, shut the fuck up,” the devil snapped, his mouth turning down in annoyance. “You’re crashing, not dying. Get over it. I told you, just a little longer and I’ll hook you up with something to make it better. You just need to trust me.”

  “I do,” Jesus whispered through chattering teeth. “I really do.”

  The bar was grimy and gross and made Jesus grimace as soon as he stepped inside. It reeked of pot smoke and sweat, with a faint trace of puke wafting from the back, towards the bathrooms. The lighting was bad and the state of sanitation, or lack thereof, was worse; the floors were sticky with spilt beer and gawd knows what else, and the tabletops were all coated in a layer of grime, dust, and crumbs. A foursome of angry-looking men with barrel chests and big hairy arms was crowded around the battered and uneven pool table, and there were two overweight hookers passing a joint back and forth at the far end of the bar. Jesus could feel all of their eyes on him, judging him, and he shifted uncomfortably and whispered to Lucifer, “They don’t like me. They all look like they want to hurt me.”

  “You’re paranoid. Shut up.”

  They took seats at the end of the bar opposite the stoned whores, and Lucifer snapped his fingers at the ancient bartender, who was nodding off behind the cash register. He awoke with a startled jolt and blinked at Jesus and Satan, his glossy eyes blank and uncomprehending. His wrinkled complexion was gray and mottled, and his greasy white hair hung around his gaunt face and touched the back of his sweat-stained shirt collar. He wore short sleeves in a brazen neglect for the visibility of the sores and track marks that ran up and down his bony arms, and his baggy jeans sat low on his narrow hips. Pinned to his shirt was a nametag reading “NICK” in lettering so faded and worn that it was almost illegible. After a moment, Nick’s vacant face lit up somewhat with something akin to recognition, and he said in a droning drawl, “Adrian, haven’t seen you in a while. What are you drinking tonight?”

  “Scotch,” Lucifer said, lighting a cigarette. “Neat. And a Heineken for my friend Billy-Bob, here.”

  Jesus nodded politely at the bartender, knowing all too well how he must look, but the latter either didn’t care or was too high to notice. Jesus saw there was a second bartender, with a low-cut white blouse bearing a nametag that read “ALICE”, but she was passed out on the floor, out of sight from the other patrons, with a hypodermic needle hanging loosely from a withered vein in the crook of her arm.

  “She’s fine, don’t worry,” Nick said when he brought the drinks over. He set the scotch in front of Jesus and the beer in front of the devil, who just grinned an amused smile and switched them with casual wordlessness. “I’ve been checking on her, and she’s still breathing. I got some really pure shit yesterday that really knocks you on your ass, and she has a habit of doing too much, anyway.” He glanced down at her with an unconcerned shrug and absently scratched at his forearm.

  “Funny you should mention that,” Lucifer said after tossing the glass back and draining it in a single swallow. He gestured for a refill and went on, “Billy-Bob is crashing pretty hard from his first coke binge, and I was hoping you’d hook him up with something to ease his comedown.”

  Jesus tried not to appear desperate, but he was; he had reached a state of mind in which he wanted only to hide in a corner and weep, and he was now entirely open to anything that might relieve him of that overwhelming misery.

  “Well…” Nick said nervously, not making eye contact with either of them, “you see, um, I’ve only got…”

  “You owe me a favor, Nick,” the devil said, crushing his cigarette out on the bar and dropping it to the floor. His face was suddenly grim and foreboding, his dark features set in an intimidating scowl.

  Nick bit his lip, still unable to look at either of them. “Right, yeah, right. Okay. Still, he really shouldn’t do much, because this is some legit China White fire, man, and he doesn’t look like he’s got a whole lot of experience.”

  “He doesn’t, so that’s fine. The last thing I want is for the bastard to fucking OD on me, so just use your best junkie judgment.”

  Nick nodded slowly. “Yeah, okay. I…don’t have any clean spikes, though, so he’ll have to settle for one I’ve already used. I mean, I haven’t been tested in a couple years, but I feel like I would know if I had something, right?” The look on his face seemed to be pleading for confirmation of this,
and somewhere in the back of his head, Jesus felt sad for him.

  “Oh yes, you’d definitely know,” said the devil with a cool smile. “Now please, go cook him up a shot and then I’ll take him out back and have him do it in the alley.”

  “He can do it in here, I don’t give a shit. No one else will care, either.”

  “I am obliged, but this is his first time so he’ll very likely throw up, and this place already smells bad enough.”

  Nick nodded again and scampered into the office on the other side of the room, closing the door behind him.

  Jesus nursed his beer nervously and said in a mousy tone, “I really don’t want to throw up.”

  “Once the rush hits you, you won’t care. It’ll be the most pleasant puke you’ve ever had.”

  Jesus didn’t tell him he’d never puked before, pleasant or otherwise. Some things just aren’t worth saying aloud. Some things just aren’t worth saying at all.

  “No,” the devil was saying, stern-faced, arms folded over his chest. “I can’t do anything for you any more than I can make you do anything. I can present you with an opportunity, but I can’t make you take it.”

  Jesus was sitting against a rusty Dumpster with Satan’s belt fastened around his left arm and the syringe clutched in his right hand, slippery in his sweaty palm. A network of veins stood bulgingly pronounced in his forearm, but Jesus was afraid. He’d asked Lucifer to inject it for him, clearly to no avail.

  “What if I fuck it up?”

  “Then it’ll go into a muscle and you’ll get an excruciating, pus-engorged sore the size of a golf ball. And you won’t get high. So don’t fuck it up.”

  Jesus took a shuddering breath and wiped perspiration from his brow with the back of his clammy hand. He once more looked up at Lucifer with pleading eyes, but the latter only shook his head with cold resolve. “I’ve watched eight-year-old kids do it without even blinking, for fuck’s sake. You can’t tell me the Son of God can’t do a simple shot of dope.”

  Blinking angrily, Jesus took another deep breath. The despair of the comedown was very quickly overcoming his anxiety, so with a calm that was jarring in its steadiness, he carefully slid the tip of the needle into a welcoming vein in the crook of his arm, wincing as he watched smoke-like plumes of scarlet billow up into the chamber of the syringe, mixing with the foreign concoction within. A quick glance at Lucifer, this time one of steadfast determination as opposed to childlike fear, yielded a mildly disconcerting glimpse of a smile that seemed somehow far more wicked than any he’d yet seen upon the devil’s face. He paid it little mind, and returned his gaze to the needle in his arm.

  Fuck you, Dad, he thought.

  He pushed the stopper down.

  “You’re drooling.”

  Jesus looked around and blinked, searching for the source of the voice, which seemed so far away and garbled as if underwater. He was sitting at the bar, or slouching, if a more accurate term were to be applied, with his head lolling around atop his shoulders as if tethered there only barely and to a badly-oiled bearing. A filmy gray fog hung over his surroundings, and everything had a kind of nullified nothing sound to it, like barely-audible static on a television with the sound turned down. He had a stomach ache accompanied by slight nausea, and he vaguely remembered throwing up outside, but he didn’t care; he was high, a word he’d never fully understood until his vein had drunk up that magical elixir and brought upon him this state of hazy transcendence.

  High.

  “You’re drooling.”

  Jesus rubbed at his eyes, a slow and languid action that seemed to take far longer than it should have, and the blurry visage of Lucifer materialized on the barstool next to him. His lips were moving…but the words coming out didn’t quite synch properly with his mouth, reminding Jesus of a poorly-dubbed Godzilla film.

  “You’re drooling,” the devil was saying for what was either the third time or just a continued echo of the first. “Wipe your fucking mouth, dude, that’s gross.”

  Jesus attempted to do just that, but his arms had trebled in weight since he’d raised them to rub his eyes just moment/s (singular? plural?) prior, so his left fell lifelessly into his lap and his right slid off the bar and came to just hang pathetic and disjointed at his side. He looked down at them, from one to the other and then back to the first, and something about all of this struck him as comical and he burst into a fit of wheezy giggles, until he could no longer support his head in its upright position so he let it fall to the bar, where he felt his cheek stick to something wet upon its surface so he realized that he must have been drooling, after all.

  “How do you feel?” the fuzzy-shaped Japanese actor next to him was asking. “Is that coke crash starting to subside?”

  Jesus snickered and said, “En uh zur-eds ut ee-o-ee-uh uz ad.”

  The Japanese man laughed and lit a cigarette. “Hiroshima was hilarious,” he said, leading Jesus to wonder if perhaps he wasn’t a zipperhead as originally thought. With some effort he was able to peel his face from the bar and once again sit more or less upright, and the actor briefly came into focus and Jesus for a second remembered who he was and that he wasn’t an actor, much less a zipperhead, and for that same second he remembered where they were and how he’d gotten here, all of it surging back in a dizzying rush that made him lightheaded and he almost threw up again (again? had he thrown up before?) but he choked it down and noticed that the burly men by the pool table were looking at him again, and not so nicely, so he mentioned this to Lucifer but Lucifer just frowned and told him he was being paranoid again, to just enjoy the high and stop worrying about stupid shit, so Jesus resolved to do exactly that even though he really couldn’t say that he was worried so much as he was purely curious in a disinterested sort of way as to why the men might be interested in him, and he thought perhaps they wanted to fuck him, which now wasn’t a terrible enough notion but he thought he would prefer it be the devil’s dick inside of him as opposed to those men’s sweaty steroid-shriveled disgraces.

  “What’s so funny?” the devil was asking, and Jesus started to ask what he meant until he realized he was laughing but couldn’t recall why, and now that he thought about it, he couldn’t even recall what he’d been thinking about a few seconds ago. Male anatomy? Steroids? Toad the Wet Sprocket, or maybe J.M. Coetzee? He kept trying to

  dolls everywhere…sprawled across the airport with their porcelain faces bashed in and their glass eyes rolling about on the tile…one of them crunches under a police officer’s boot heel while stern-faced city servants stare at the scene, curled fake hair torn from rubber scalps of something that surely at one point in its life had it continued to exist would have been some little girl’s best friend but perhaps this was not to be so and had it survived it would have gotten its own place and said FUCK THE WORLD and boots worn by boots are as classy as they come…you say you were talking to somebody about this yesterday; was she also a boot? did you know she was a boot? when you ask somebody something, perhaps when you tell them something, without doubt warrants response under circumstances that at the very least would be considered polite.

  Snapping fingers in his face…the long pale fingers of the devil…snap snap snap…“Billy-Bob, are you in there? Earth to Billy-Bob. Fuck, man, is there anyone in there?”

  Jesus looked around blankly, as if groping along in the dark for a light switch that doesn’t exist, blinking uselessly against a darkness that wasn’t there and saying, “Um, I…who? Who is…what?”

  Disapproval…likely, Jesus assumed, directed at him, but from whom and for what he did not know, but

  sipping champagne in classy restaurants where the waiters all wear tuxedos and the customers sit around lethargic and fat, not in a manner we consider perhaps disgusting but just more reflective of their sense of comfort, many of whom clearly have EARNED that degree of comfort which they now possess because so many are HANDED comfort because of luck and little else but at the same time LUCK as a general concept could be referred to
as…IRRELEVANT.

  The pool players were no longer playing pool and had come over to the bar to drink their beer, talking quietly among one another and stealing unsubtle glances at Jesus and Lucifer, but more so, Jesus thought, at him, and he thought vaguely about saying something to Lucifer again but then he realized no, the men are too close, they might overhear, and if they

  you can say things good or bad to people…f has p…which does not mean anything…perhaps a glitch perhaps an error perhaps…for service people? Just looking at that making this strictly a service elevator…is that correct? And by that I mean staying in this area.

  Jesus decided they were definitely talking about him, and whatever they were saying was not pleasant. Wait…was that Lucifer, talking to them now? Yes, it was, and he seemed to be talking about Jesus, too, but it certainly couldn’t be anything bad, because he was his friend…his lover, and he wouldn’t just

  howling court jesters and giggling faceless schoolgirls hopping scotch while Daddy pounds Becks at Beck’s and the neighbors all talk among each other about each other because they are afraid to face themselves as well as what may become of them if they go searching for something and find it…because you can look and look and turn over every rock and look behind every tree and search every cave, batter down shanty doors with the sturdy stocks of your guns and shout and rustle about and throw things hither and thither, breaking that which appears to be of sentimental value and pocketing that which is of more MONETARY value to you and to US as a collective and shout WHERE ARE THEY and shout WHERE ARE YOU HIDING THEM and go crashing down the stairs and line up the cowering mice, ignoring their pleas, shooting them one by one and keeping the cheese from their traps because it was always entitled to you anyway.

  Talking to him now, or at him, rather, loudly and angrily, coating Jesus’ face with spittle and bombarding his nostrils with the proximity of their alcohol-reeking breath, and Jesus tried to listen to what they were saying at him but they were too loud and every time he tried to strain himself to hear he kept remembering that he just didn’t give a shit, so