by James Wymore
“Hawkman” Daniel continued, “You guys! Abbey finished her ballad last night before lights out. Paulo said the whiteboard swirled into this portal thing, and a bright light sucked her through. She’s gone armadillo!”
Beto and I both sat up. “No way,” I said. “How did she get around the problem of Hell forcing us to sleep ten hours a day?”
“Did she sing through the night?” asked Beto.
Daniel shook his head. “Paulo says she sang her ballad in thirteen hours. She sang super fast, and hit every note perfectly.”
Beto and I looked at each other. I wanted to laugh and say I was relieved we weren’t working toward something so ridiculously difficult. Really, how did Lord Mazda expect to compel all of us to sing a thousand-page song in thirteen hours straight? That wasn’t my personality, though. In life, I loved achievement. I loved school, and stretching my mind to learn new things. I felt jealous. Someone had done it. Someone had met the great Car Dealer’s challenge and gotten out of Hell in ten years. It could be done after all, and I had spent ten years doing nothing about it. Beto and I were living a lie, pretending we would never leave just because it seemed impossible.
No, that wasn’t the real reason we were determined to stay forever, I reminded myself. We sensed something we didn’t like, something that seemed very wrong about our existence here, and we didn’t want to give ourselves over to that system—that conversion—willingly.
While it was true that our minds and bodies were neither growing nor maturing, and we knew they never would in Hell, we were changing. Our independent wills were slowly leaching out of our souls. Someday there would be nothing but the great Car Dealer’s will to fill our desires and compel our movements. It would just happen. At that day, we would no longer be our own creatures but His to control. We would be perfect, absolute… what we didn’t know. This much terrified us. We were desperate not to lose our free will, and to exercise that will for as long as we still possessed it. Keeping boredom at bay was essential.
Every child dreams of living to be one hundred. I didn’t live that long, obviously, which means one hundred years after my arrival in Hell, I still looked, moved, and used my brain like a ten-year-old girl. I never thought I’d envy someone who experienced aging. What would it be like to look in a bathroom mirror at a face full of wrinkles from years of smiling, a little too much sunshine, and deep, grown-up thoughts?
It was on this day where my perfect memory marked the passing of exactly one hundred years that I realized my little brother had probably died by now. Years of agonizing about his fate was over, because it didn’t matter anymore whether the bear got him or he lived long enough to have children and grandchildren. Unless he had miraculously converted to Zoroastrianism within his lifetime, which I highly doubted, he had most certainly landed in Hell.
The horror of this thought hit me as I contemplated how much more it would hurt to live a full life, to get married, have kids, go to college, and fly rocket ships into space if he’d done that after all, only to have all those relationships and accomplishments turn out to mean nothing. At the same time, I still envied the thought of living a full lifetime, of growing up.
Most of the friends in our group who wanted to leave Hell were gone now. Those that were determined to stay had scattered, and the general population of our never-ending hallway had dwindled significantly. Hell was no longer the noisy, bustling, brawling stew of the first years. Sometimes, for long stretches, it was dead silent. Empty.
“I love you, Justina,” Beto said. He still held my hand as we walked the seemingly endless hallway. We’d been walking for almost a year now, and still hadn’t found the end of Hell’s school for ten-year-olds.
What would it have been like to grow up together? To get married and grow old together? I imagined people changed a lot as they grew out of childhood in particular, but some people still married their childhood friends. We never pretended to get married in Hell. We were still waiting to grow up, even though we knew we never would. We’d grown so close, but we could never be more than friends as children.
“What shall we do today?”
“We’ve read every book in the tablet libraries,” I replied sullenly. Every story in the tablets was a strange parable about sacrifice with twisted double meanings that made me hate them all and pity any child here who might glean false wisdom from them.
Beto said, “We’ve read everything except… you know, our forbidden ones on Avestan, reading music, and our ballads.”
I paused. Sweat broke out all over me, and my body went cold at the mention of these things. They sounded so interesting, so intriguing. Reading the references wasn’t the same as putting them all together to sing our ballads, but our minds could do that in Hell. We memorized everything we read, everything we saw. With time, we pieced some things together without meaning to. When I read part of the book on Avestan, I regretted it right away because my mind automatically translated half the words I’d already seen of my ballad. Boredom made my brain hungry like a withered sponge in a sea of sand and fire. If Hell’s juices weren’t soul-poison, I’d only be too cheerful to suck up what was left.
“I wish it didn’t all look exactly the same everywhere,” I said. “We’re going to get bored of everything, aren’t we?”
“I think you’re right,” Beto whispered.
“Do you think the whole universe is like this? Pointless? Meaningless? Moving toward that end? Do you think these little mortalities and Hells Mazda creates are really just what he’s ultimately experiencing, too? Are these spaces his madness, his postponement of the inevitable nothingness after existence that’s going to come for all of us, even himself?”
“Those are deep, grown-up thoughts today, Sloth.” He took both my hands and frowned in deep thoughts of his own. “How could anything exist if nothing has a point?”
“Maybe, every once in a while, there’s some blip in the great expanse of Nonexistence where the stuff of existence—time, matter, space, relationships, morality, what have you—happens briefly before it winks out again. A great ‘Never Mind.’ You know? Maybe Mazda was born in the great Never Mind, too, and even he will be swallowed up by nonexistence in the end.”
Beto nodded slowly. “So evil and destruction triumph over good and creation in the end, with little more than a stalemate of nonexistence to show for their efforts.”
I shivered.
He shivered too. “Are you thinking that when we get bored of everything and there are no consequences for anything we do…?”
“We’ll have no choices left,” I said. “We’ll go armadillo. We’ll leave Hell.”
“Because we’ll have no will left to resist it? Our wills will just cease to exist?”
I nodded. “Everything is finite here. It’s not a matter of if we’ll leave Hell. It never was an option for us. You know it too. I just… I’m sorry I dragged you along with me for so much time. Our choices, our desires… they’re all in vain.”
He shrugged. “Nothing is right in this place, either way. What’s our plan now?”
My mind kept drawing to the ballad, even though I didn’t want it to. Hot tears pooled in my eyes and spilled down my cheeks. I had cried many, many times more than I wanted to in Hell. “I think the saddest part of the day I’ll be forced to sing my ballad is the fact that I’ve spent more time with you than anyone in mortality, and your name won’t be in my life story anywhere. It’s like…”
“It never mattered,” Beto said quietly. His own tears enflamed his eyes streaked his cheeks. “I think that’s stupid.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
Beto let go of my hand forever the day he sang his ballad. Two hundred and fifty-three years after our arrival in Hell, when we were all but alone, his expression turned hollow as the doom of ultimate boredom settled over him. There was nothing left to say to each other, nothing left to see or do that would hold meaning for us. Like every other relationship we had ever known in life or in death, ours was quickly dissolving i
nto nothingness. If we all learned one thing in Hell, it was that nothing lasted forever. Not our ties. Not our choices. Not our suffering. Not even our souls.
After the bright light of the whiteboard’s vortex swallowed him up, I sank in the far corner of that room, wondering what it would feel like to dissolve out of existence. I had felt something close to that sort of thing once, between the moment I left the demon’s office and the moment I arrived here. Was I ready for my will and being as I knew them to dissolve away into a billion unorganized particles, to become a new invention perfectly mastered by the great Ahura Mazda? Was I ready to embrace nothingness?
No. I wanted so badly to be, to exist and resist the pull of that unseen black hole at the center of all creation. To believe I would grow up, see Beto again, reunite with my brother and my parents. I hated death for robbing me of progress, and nothingness for robbing Ahura Mazda’s spheres of meaning. All that was would cease to be very soon, and much of it already had, I was sure.
It didn’t take long after Beto disappeared for my will to give way. One other soul ventured into the nearest cafeteria. I didn’t know his name or who his friends had been in Hell. I didn’t know if he was still in Hell because he wanted to be, or because he’d suffered a traumatic death and had a hard time learning his ballad. I killed him one day and used his blood to secure two blood treats for myself from the Kiosk: a barbecue pork sandwich and a bowl of chocolate ice cream. After that, I kept the hapless boy hostage, killing him every day for three weeks. At the start of one new day, he killed me first and got away.
I resisted learning my ballad for several months by stabbing myself in the head at the start of each day. Killing myself soon grew monotonous, and the inertness of temporary death tasted too much of nothingness. I switched to cutting off my fingers, which were restored each morning. The pain and horror of removing my own fingers over and over induced shock and kept me from thinking about my ballad for several months more. To this, I grew numb, too. Bored. I was so, so bored. Nothing fazed me anymore. I didn’t care about dying or suffering, losing anyone or anything. Nothing changed in Hell. Nothing mattered here. Ever.
Even that pattern of sixes and eights cropping up everywhere lost its intrigue over time. The whiteboards said Paradise held the answers we sought, so it was clear some things could never be fully explained in Hell, and perhaps were never meant to be. A mystery that remained forever mysterious, like a road that leads forever nowhere, peters out in the forests of oblivion.
Beto was gone. Beto was no more. I would never see Beto again. Ever again. Someday soon, I wouldn’t even know him. I wouldn’t have a conscious, meaningful thought about him, or anyone, or anything, ever again. And Beto? He’d already forgotten everyone and everything. He’d already forgotten me. I was alone. No, alone was woefully inadequate to describe that feeling. I was cut off. I was nothing. My existence was utterly meaningless in all its audacity to take up shape and make shadow—a great Never Mind. That’s what finally broke me.
I read my ballad over and over until I was bored. I read the reference on Avestan over and over until I was bored. Absolutely nothing remained in Hell that interested me, I read about music, playing with translation and singing. My heart grew numb as my resistance to the universe’s will abated. I felt cold inside, empty, as I stood before the whiteboard and began to sing. The notes flowed out of my soul in prickling, needle-like swells, eroding all that remained of my defiance like a river of ice carving u-shaped channels through mountain bedrock.
Stripped of my desires to learn and grow, overcome with apathy about the fate of all those I had ever loved on Earth and in Hell, the solid white mass of the whiteboard warped into a tunnel of light. This light was no light at all, but darkness in the similitude of light, cold and unforgiving as sunshine in the dead of winter.
As my skin, bone, and being disintegrated into the Great Destroyer’s maw, never to be one Justina Harper ever again, my lips offered one final pleading prayer on behalf of Beto, my brother, myself, and all mortal souls that had ever existed, that I was mistaken about everything.
A milky white fog enveloped the miniaturized scene of unsupervised ten-year-olds pacing an endless hallway set into the little glass test tube. Timothy frowned at the window in his palm.
He met his best friend, Patrick, when he was ten. They both joined the army right out of high school. Timothy never had a girlfriend, but Pat did. Pat said he was going to marry that girl when he got home. But he never went home.
Was Pat in Hell? Had his soul been obliterated out of existence, like the innocent children Timothy had just seen dissolving away into nothing one by one?
Timothy squeezed the tube in his fist until the glass shattered. A puff of ghostly white mist hissed out. It smelled like morning dew on wet grass in summer, like hamburgers grilling on a backyard barbecue. Like the warm scent of a beloved pet rat nestled into a fresh bed of straw, the one Patrick took off Timothy’s hands and cared for when his mother refused to let him keep the animal in his own house. The smells were raw and deep, deeper than the evocations of rocket fuel and Pat’s flesh burning beside him in a ditch, pinned under a massive piece of debris that had fallen out of the sky.
He let the blood slither down between his fingers, let it drip and pool in the darkness at his feet. Timothy hadn’t cared much about dying. He hadn’t cared much about being in Hell. Now he was angry.
He was tired of watching people hurt each other, watching people suffer unspeakable things before they crumbled away like dust. After the war, he’d been unable to touch anybody or do anything that would ever make a difference. Nothing mattered. Nothing ever would. Now that he had decent lungs, he couldn’t even help the damned souls in Hell. He could only watch them suffer and disintegrate out of existence. Billions and billions of souls that had no idea what life in Hell was really about. Did he really know either? No, of course not.
Timothy threw his arm across the strange lone shelf on the basaltic wall of his own endless hallway, knocking the bottles and vials full of little Hell visions to the stony black floor with a crash. He clawed at the closest full-sized windows, screaming to be let out, or let in. But no one heard Timothy’s shrill song of madness. Even Timothy didn’t know what he screamed. Warnings to the souls inside that total destruction might be eminent? Profanities to the deity? Cries for mercy?
He slid to the floor, rocking his knees against the rough stone while chanting, “Six bottles, floor eight… Six bottles… That has to mean something, doesn’t it?”
iery red. Eyes of flame. The demon’s last words escaped me. The glass window revealing the scene of burning flesh unnerved me, and although the power of his commanding visage and blistering voice should have been such that I should have more easily attended to whatever instructions he gave, my fear and terror masked them completely.
All I heard was, “Learn something.”
Around me chaos. Cold, hard metal gripped my face like a vise and pulled me from warmth and security into a cacophony of sound and a spinning confusion of light and blurry images. The oval device enveloping the top of my head ripped open my cheek and pinched the corner of my mouth where blood gushed from an open wound. Drenched in blood, I was hoisted upside down and a sharp slap on my bottom sent me wailing.
I was placed naked on a white, towel-covered scale, wrapped up in a warm blanket, and handed to a woman. It was my mother. My real mother. I recognized her both from fond memories and pictures of her from the ‘50s that had graced a cabinet that had attended all of my childhood and that had accompanied our family in many moves—from California to Utah and on and on until we moved to Moab. I looked into my mother’s face. She was so young! A little girl really. She looked ragged and worn from giving birth. And even though she looked ready to collapse, she managed to give me a smile. The doctor took me away to stitch my mouth and repair the damage from the forceps, a scar I would bear until the day I died. I’d heard the story of my bloody, mismanaged breech birth all my life
O
ver the next few weeks, months, and over the course of years, it was clear that I was living my life over again. Not exactly. Because I was still the “post-death” me. The me that lived this same life once before, except then I could control it. I could make decisions. This time I was in essence watching my life through my eyes, ears, and the other senses. I could not affect anything. I could do nothing but watch, but I felt everything exactly as it had occurred in my life. It was like I was inserted into a virtual reality immersion game, except it was all cut-scene and I never got to control my avatar.
I learned quickly that I would feel everything my old self felt, both physically and emotionally, but only as an observer. I could influence nothing. I could not speak to my kindergartener self or warn him (me?) that running with my hands in my pockets would result in falling and cutting my head open, requiring stitches.
It was not just the feeling of falling and being in pain, I seemed to have access to a deeper level of my consciousness. I understood more about the event than I ever did in life. I understood my motivations. I was given to understand the myriad of pressures and distractions that conditioned every response. I could assign clear weightings to both nature and nurture. I knew what DNA had driven me to do and how my past experiences up to that time leaned me toward one propensity or another. I too saw that life bestows freedom in ways I never understood. It manifested to my post-mortal state as a pause or a gap—a kind of space—in the tangle of causes that vectored me toward some end. This void surprised me—especially the way it engaged with other causes to create a complex manifestation of will. Sometimes this freedom appeared in things I had been convinced came from some force of irrevocable fate. Other times, some action surely freely chosen turned out to be nothing but a clever combination of my biological programing and the historical nuances of life’s experiences.