by James Wymore
I finally looked at it and immediately saw why: my left arm ended a few inches above my wrist. The hand itself was nowhere to be seen, just one more piece of detritus in the ruined office space I had crashed into. I was bleeding. Bleeding fast and hard. Bleeding out, probably.
Panic gripped me, a unique terror that I had never before felt. I had faced death many times. I had caused it as well, and neither caused me to blink or to think much about them.
But I had never died in Hell.
What would happen if I did die here? Would I be “really” dead? Would I cease to exist? Would I, perhaps, leave this Hell and find myself plunged into one that was worse?
The most frightening possible answers to my questions fought with one another as I managed to roll drunkenly off the car. I came face-to-flame with fire, sheets of orange-red-white-blue dancing up the side of the Lamborghini. Contrary to the movies and television, it’s very rare for a car to explode when set on fire. Usually it just vomits out noxious fumes for a few hours, then the flames disappear.
So I wasn’t worried about becoming a crispy critter. But I was still spurting blood out of the stump of my left arm.
Don’t wanna die. Can’t die after being killed.
Don’t die!
I knew what I had to do, and knew that if I thought about it too long it would never happen.
I rammed my bleeding stump into the fire that coated the side of the car. Pushed the raw flesh of my injury against the super-heated metal beyond the flame itself.
I heard sizzling. A wet pfshh that reminded me of sausages my grandma used to make.
I felt pain. Pain like I had never known, pain so deep and white and harsh it transcended itself. It became a personage, an entity of near-flesh that melded to my own yielding skin and blood and bone.
I screamed. Screamed and screamed and even in the very depths of my pain. I couldn’t tell if the screams were of agony, or of some strange pleasure that lay beyond it.
Then I fell senseless and the darkness of oblivion claimed me.
When my eyes fluttered open, I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. There was something sticky on my face, something that crackled and pulled at my flesh. I raised my hand to brush at it, and at the same time something hit my cheek. It was soft, rounded.
My eyes were open at this point, but I wasn’t seeing. Not in any but the most technical sense. Light was entering my irises, but my brain was not making sense of the images.
The crackling sensation worsened. It felt like a bad sunburn. I tried to brush at it again, and again something blunt, soft—not entirely unpleasant-feeling—hit my face.
I blinked. It was a purposeful motion, an up-and-downing of my eyelids that I intended to wipe clean the dust that had settled over my mind. When my eyes opened this time, I began to see. Really see.
The car was beside me. Still warm from the fire that had burnt much of it to a slag of plastic and metal.
I saw my right hand. Covered in blood that had dried and congealed to a strange mass of brown-black scab. That must be the sunburn feeling: the crackle of blood caked all over my arms and chest and face. I was lucky to be alive… if that was even the right term.
I shifted my gaze to my left hand. And began to scream. Because I saw it not at the end of my arm, but lying in a pile of debris a few feet away. My left arm ended in a rounded nub, completely enclosed by skin that had grown over the stump and now—what I believed to be only a few minutes or hours after the accident—somehow had the appearance of a severe wound long-healed. Something that had happened years ago. Not minutes. Not hours. Decades .
The thing that had been hitting me in the face was my own arm, sans hand. A useless stump.
I kept screaming.
But there was no pain. Like the skin that had grown over the stump, my injuries—and I could feel that there had been many, not just the hand—were all completely healed. The only pain present was mental, not physical.
I had no hand.
I could feel my back, crooked as though it had been terribly wrenched once-upon-a-time, and never properly healed. No pain, but my motion was restricted. I could turn my waist to the right, but to the left it was stiff and unyielding.
I was the survivor of an enormous trauma that had happened only minutes ago, but somehow my body had performed years of healing in that time.
I rolled to my stomach. Pushed up on hand and stump; rose unsteadily to my feet.
I left the wrecked place, the wrecked car.
I found some food in a nearby restaurant. I was beyond hungry, I was famished . I began the laborious process of teaching myself to eat and move with one hand and much of my back’s flexibility restricted.
I was in the body of a five-year-old. Maybe six at this point. A child who had been through a lifetime of injury and the possibly greater trauma of healing. I was a wreck of physical abuse.
I was alone.
And I stayed alone. Alone through the meandering days, the mindless months, the horrifying years that passed, one after another. Walking, occasionally riding a skateboard or a bicycle for some variety (no more cars for me). Exploring countless rooms in countless buildings. Alone.
I hurt myself a few times. Badly, I mean. In my teens—that is, when my body looked like that of a teenager—I got it in my head to climb the outside of a building adorned with statues that reminded me vaguely of the demon who’d sent me here. I fell after getting less than ten feet up. Broke my leg in two places, bone sticking through the flesh of my thigh. I fainted from pain and when I woke the bone was healed, but it had never been set. I walked with a severe limp after that.
Another time I set fire to one of the high-rises. I did it right, too. Not just setting open flame to the outside of it, which would have done nothing to the ferroconcrete structure. I packed the first floor full of propane tanks I found in a warehouse a block away, hauling them one after another in a succession that probably took over a year. Then I packed the rest of the space in the first floor with flammable items: paper, chair stuffing, anything I could find. Another year’s monotony, another year of invented purpose barely staving off an abyss of madness.
When I lit the fire, I didn’t expect the first propane tank to go up quite so fast. Again, I felt pain as the flames engulfed me, then my body shut down out of self-preservation. When I woke, the fire was out, the building was still standing… but the right side of my body was covered in scar tissue, the shining white of wounds healed an impossible time in the past.
I was also naked since the fire had burned the clothes right off my skin. But I didn’t bother getting dressed. Why should I? What were clothes to me here, now?
I was, I estimated, about sixty years old at this point. My body, that is. I had no idea how old I really was, or if that kind of thing even mattered.
What was age in Hell? What were years without human experience; without the wisdom that came from change?
I limped my way through days and decades. Alone, lost in a city that had become my world. Seventy years old. Eighty.
I tried to leave the city more than once. To find my way back to the suburban neighborhood where I had first awoken. I never could. The city stretched out for an infinity—or so near to one that it made no difference. I spent two years walking in a straight line and when I went out on the top of the nearest high-rise, I could only see buildings stretching forever in every direction.
Nothing ever changed. There was no dust, no sense of rot or malaise in anything but me. The food never spoiled; there was no inclement weather. Every day was sunny, every night was clear and utterly starless. There was nothing to change the monotony, nothing to give any sense of the passage of time, other than a pad I carried around to mark passing days.
I think I was about eighty-five when I died. I could be wrong. There was a long period in my seventies when I went more than a little mad. I don’t remember much of it, and it’s very hard to keep track of time when you’re barking at the moon and frantically trying to h
ave sex with a life-sized teddy bear you found in a toy store so as to create a new master race of creatures blessed with the mind of a man and the stuffing of a plush toy.
Yeah, not my best moment.
Still, I was fairly certain I was around eighty-five the day I finally died… again.
I was on a bed I’d found to pass the night. Woke up to the singing of a bird outside somewhere. I had never seen a bird, never seen anything alive in this place but me, but I did hear the chirps from time to time and they were like a gift.
I got up slowly. Joints creaking with age, skin tight with scar tissue, old injuries keeping me from moving with any fluidity or speed.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
My chest hurt.
I grabbed it with my good hand, my remaining hand.
Then I fell forward. I felt my heart stuttering. K-dub, lub-d-dub.
I died.
And I died smiling. Thinking with my last strength: At last .
My eyes opened.
I looked around. I was in the same bed where I had died. And I knew that I had died. There was something deep in me that said this was my second go-round on the mad, monotonous Tilt-A-Whirl that my life or afterlife had become.
I was dead… again .
Alive… once more .
I rolled over. And in doing so I realized that I was moving with ease. Moving without the lingering numbness of mangled nerves, the stiffness of bones healed at wrong angles. I smiled. Held up my left arm, looking for a hand I somehow knew would be there once more, perfectly restored.
I was right. So right. More right than I counted on. That’s why I started screaming. Shrieking for so long that my world became only the sound of agony and despair.
My hand was back. Perfect. Pink.
Young.
I had died after nearly a century of wandering alone. And the next morning I awakened in my five-year-old body again. Staring at a freckle on a hand I hadn’t had in ninety years, and no joy from seeing it because that freckle was on a hand so small and young that I knew I was doomed to continue playing this most awful game. Go Directly to Young, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200 . Just one more spin through a worthless, monotonous, pointless life.
Or whatever this was. Can it still be life after you’ve died twice?
I sat up.
Stood up.
Left the room.
Walked the city.
Lived a life—
Or something horribly like it.
This time I didn’t last as long. Nowhere near the ninetyish years of my first go-round. When I woke up on the first day of my second (after)life I couldn’t find the pad I’d been using to mark off days, and I honestly forgot about it for a few months. But then I started keeping track again, and so I knew I was in my forty-sixth year for the second time.
I was on the fifty-second floor of a high-rise. I’d found a really nice boardroom and decided to become president and CEO of a new company. I was lecturing the empty seats, outlining our mission statement, when I heard birdsong.
As before, the birds were nowhere to be seen, but the thought seized me that if only I found the right vantage point, I might actually find them. I excused myself from the meeting—being the president and CEO comes with its privileges—then threw a chair out the window and climbed out onto the narrow ledge that surrounded the building.
The birds had to be out here. Had to be somewhere close. I could hear them. Could hear their songs.
I slipped without seeing them.
Wondered how badly I would be crippled when I woke up from my fall.
But apparently the rules were different for injuries that were fatal in and of themselves. I hit the ground. I survived long enough to hear the low click-tik-ti-click of my teeth raining down on the sidewalk all around me after bouncing right out of my head. Then I died.
I woke up the next morning on the sidewalk.
Young again.
I didn’t scream this time. Being my third “birth” day in this strange place, I finally realized that I was doomed to live and die forever here. So no screams. I just ran. Ran. Ran. Tried to get out of the city, to retrace my steps to where I had started, the place beyond the limits of the city. The little boy’s room. I belonged there. I shouldn’t have left.
I never found my way out of the city. Of course not. The city was all there was now. The only life I had, the only world I would know. But I ran so hard my heart burst in my chest. I died.
I awoke. I lived. Died. Lived.
So many, many times.
Nothing ever went bad. Nothing ever spoiled. Nothing ever died but me —and then I would wake up the next morning in whatever place I died the day before, and the whole thing started over.
I lived a hundred times. Then a thousand. Ten thousand.
When I was thirty-five—iteration: 11,659—I thought I sensed something different. I felt watched. I stopped what I was doing (arguing with the invisible man who sold me the lawn chair I’d been carrying with me for the last seven years), and looked around. The city was, as always, my only company.
But I realized that the birds had been chirping a moment ago. And now… silence. As though something—
Some one, please, whoever is in charge of this, please let it be some one.
—had frightened them to silence.
I stayed there the entire day. Didn’t move once. Not even when I had to void my bladder and bowels. I just let loose where I stood, hoping that if I remained silent and still I might see whatever—
Whoever !
—was out there.
Sometime in the evening, the birds began to chirp again. Sadness gripped me. Despair so powerful that I did the only reasonable thing: I ran to the nearest open door, which led to the office of a tax preparation firm. I found a pencil and rammed it through my throat, twisting so that I would tear out carotids and jugular in one ecstatic motion.
I woke up the next morning. Age five; iteration: 11,660.
I nearly despaired. For the millionth time in my ten thousand lives, I nearly lost control.
But something stopped me. Because this time, for the first time, when I woke there was something different .
It wasn’t much, but it was everything. Just a small piece of paper, but it was a piece of paper that signaled change .
Or perhaps not. Perhaps this was just one more spiral, a ring concentric to the ones in which I had been spinning for a near-eternity. Because though the paper was new to this place, it was definitely one that I had seen before. At least, I’d seen its type before.
The paper was folded across my young chest, my new five-year-old hands clasped over it when I came out of my most recent death and into my newest life. A simple white sheet, folded down the middle.
I unfolded it with hands that were too small for the task to come. Too weak for what must happen soon.
When I was alive—really alive, in a place before this unchanging stream of events that did not matter, in a place where others lived and walked with me, I had seen these papers. They were my vocation, my lifestyle… and ultimately they led to my death.
The paper I found in my hands contained the same information these papers always held. In life, the real one that is, they had been delivered to a dead drop—a trash can, or a P.O. Box with a dummy owner—not tucked in my grasp as I slept. But as in life, this page had only three things:
A location.
A time.
A picture.
I skipped over the first two, moving to the printed photo. The paper darkened in perfect circles as tears fell from my cheeks and wet it.
This was the first face I had seen in many hundreds of thousands of years. There was no way to view my own image—no reflections, only exhortations to Know Thyself —and after a few years I realized that there were no other images of people, either. Books I found had missing spaces where pictures had once been. Every photo frame I saw held only blank paper in its boundaries. Even Chef Boyardee had been scrupulously wiped a
way from every can of Spaghetti-Os I found in one pantry.
So this face… this stranger’s face on the paper, it was worth more than any treasure I had ever held. It was grainy, low resolution. But it was a face . The face of a middle-aged man, nondescript save a shock of white hair that ran the length of his scalp.
I finally looked away from the face. Stared at the time and place stated. The place was one I knew, a street only a few miles away from where I happened to be. The time listed: 6:00 p.m.
I looked for a clock. I was still in the tax preparation office—as always, I seemed to have been reborn the next day in the very place I had died—so finding one wasn’t hard. Several wall clocks, a few desk clocks. I had stopped paying attention to clocks many millennia ago, but now I checked the time once more. Checked to see if I would be able to get to the location in time.
Whenever I slept, I would wake up at 5:19 a.m. the next morning, with no exceptions and no deviations. But when I woke up the day after dying, I might wake up at any time, from very early morning to late afternoon.
This time I had awakened at noon. Plenty of time to get where I needed to go.
I started walking.
Soon I was skipping . Because this wasn’t just something new. This paper wasn’t merely a new twist in the Mobius strip of my existence. No, this was a way out . I knew it was, knew it represented the end of my time in Hell. I had somehow earned my way out of this place.
If I did just one more thing; if I followed the protocols I had set up and followed so stringently in life.
I forced myself to stop skipping. Because how ridiculous would it be to trip and fall? To die on the way to my final test, or even simply to break a bone and miss the appointment?
No. Care. Care was the watchword.
I walked. Then I slowed still further. Eventually I was crawling, hands and knees coming down with painstaking attention to where each hand touched, what centimeters I would move with each passing moment.
I had to get there. But it was close. I had time.
I crawled. My small hands and knees ached. My flesh was new, so there were no calluses to protect it, and soon I was leaving a trail of bloody handprints as I went. Tiny, red palms and outspread fingers gripping each passing bit of the sidewalk, pulling it toward me, pulling myself toward my destination.