by Short Story Anthology
A buddy search revealed that Harriet was online, so I instant-messaged her. It turns out that my immortal soul types faster without my corporeal fingers in the way, and with better punctuation and accuracy.
Harriet responded.
I winced when I saw these words. I had always claimed to have a dead-man switch installed deep in Falling Man's system, in case the other partners decided to get rid of me. My story was that if I didn't type in a special code once a week, my dead-man program would recognize my absence and activate, rampantly destroying all the company's stored data. It was insurance, in case I ever found myself locked out of the office, or worse, cut out of the stock options. The truth was, however, I'd never bothered to implement the dead-man software. It was too much trouble. After all, as with nuclear weapons, a credible threat of massive retaliation was sufficient to maintain the peace.
Harriet continued:
I briefed Harriet, explaining who the client was and what he wanted, but saying nothing about the payment plan. After our little discussion, I decided to wait until I was walking the earth again before I made any more hires. The last thing I needed was a load of people pestering me about the afterlife. I had that non-disclosure agreement to worry about, after all.
A few hours later, my eyelids started to flicker, and I found myself in the demimonde between an LA hospital room and my Hell cubicle. The Devil, like some gorgeous and jocular supervisor, came over to shake my hand and say goodbye.
"When do I get the Secret?" I interrupted.
"After delivery. Just don't get hit by a bus before then."
"I'll be careful."
"And don't forget my little non-disclosure clause," he added.
"Mum's the word."
He smiled cruelly at my show of confidence. I could see in his eyes that he fully expected me to fail, to spill the beans and wind up in his clutches for eternity. I started to say something brave.
But then the netherworld faded, and I was back. Bright lights, stiff bedclothes, and thundering unstoppably into my awareness: a world of pain. It turns out that even first-degree burns can take you to the extremes of agony.
I gurgled a scream, and flailed my arms. Someone grabbed my hand, and I heard a call for morphine.
So now I know what Heaven feels like, too.
· · · · ·
Harriet and I did good work together.
For Hell's new lava, we used a liquid motion package designed by these hydrofoil designers in Germany. Extending its parameters with a little code of our own, we set the lava's viscosity to crazy—our lakes of fire hopped as lively as a puddle in a Texas hail storm. Cruel geyser heads lurked below the surface, periodically erupting to scatter a scalding mist upon the cruel abysmal wind. Harriet colored the lava an ominous dark red, texture-mapped with scanned photos of my still-scabby burns and run through with sinuous veins of eye-gouging electric crimson.
We decided to go fractal with the mountains. Each pointy crag was sharp enough to scratch a diamond, each lacerating jut of rock serrated with infinitely recessing edges-within-edges, razor-fine down to the microscopic level. You could cut yourself just looking at the stuff.
We also went fractal with the Styx 2.0, making it infinitely crooked, infinitely long. A boundless barrier between the mundane and the eternal.
Working alongside Harriet, I saw the project reflected in her eyes, their steely blue aglitter with the millions of reds in our perditious palette. My hand was always on her shoulder as we crouched over twenty-thousand-dollar monitors, and I felt the flutters of her soul in the taut muscles that extend from neck to mouse-arm. The hellish imagery turned her on, inflated her pupils like blobs of black mercury expanding in the heat of our virtual netherworld. She was hooked, transfixed, spitted by a primal sexual response to the visage of death.
She didn't really believe in our diabolical client, I could tell. But the project manufactured its own verity, until the view in the monitor became as real for her as for those who would one day occupy it.
I had known the project would capture her. Harriet was one of those artists who instinctually resisted computers, only to be ultimately seduced by them. She loved her paints, but a stroke of pigment can't be corrected. There are no RGB values to change, no pixels to nudge. You're stuck with the happenstance of that moment, without an Undo command or even a backup file. And that's a losing deal, it had always seemed to me. She always claimed that one day she'd foreswear the mouse and pick up her paintbrushes again, but the ability to tween and tweek was an irresistible siren. The algorithms that we geeks had used to colonize the screen had colonized Harriet as well.
It's an old story. Religions start with a madmen's inspiration but end up with sensible canons and commandments. Barter systems are rationalized into the liquidity of cash and credit. Mythologies are repurposed as role-playing games. Communities are arrogated by IPOs. With the visual arts it took a while longer for the number-crunchers to take over, but eventually we always win.
Art may be pretty, but rule-governed systems rule.
· · · · ·
Our biggest graphics challenge was hellfire, the ambient affliction of the damned. We needed something that would burn without devouring, a necessary provision for endless torment. But fire that doesn't consume its fuel always looks wussy. It hovers over the burning victim like it was Photoshopped on post facto, about as scary as the disembodied and exaggerated blaze of charcoal sprayed with too much lighter fluid.
We brought in some programmers and created dozens of new algorithms from scratch. We watched videos of forest and brushfires, warehouse conflagrations, accelerant infernos, the oil-well holocausts of the Gulf War. I picked my scabs endlessly, looking for answers in that crumbling, itching flesh.
Finally, we hit paydirt in that old standby: napalm. When napalm consumes flesh, it burns its own sticky fuel, charring the body beneath as a secondary effect. Sprayed with fire extinguisher foam or submerged in water, it remains alight, attached to its victim, demonically implacable.
Vietnam-era video has its limitations, of course, so we checked out a few second-amendment websites and got the recipe. We concocted a small batch of napalm from soap flakes and kerosene, and headed out to the Jersey swamps, bringing along cow-hearts and a couple of raw pigs that we'd scored from a loading dock in the meatpacking district. We burned the whole grisly pile.
During the filming, I had a flashback to my near-death in California. Waves of heat came from the crackling flesh, and a stench not unlike the sulphurous reek of Hell.
I looke
d over at Harriet, who had dropped her digital camera to stare at the flames with naked eyes. Tears ran down her cheeks, streaking the soot that had darkened her face. She gazed back at me with horror. Harriet had treated the whole project as an enjoyable lark until now. Vanity graphics for an imaginary client, my personal fetish. But I could see that the level of detail was starting to get to her.
The look in Harriet's eyes dampened my pyromania for a moment. What was I doing, working so hard to make Hell look better? How much pain would I have caused by the time Hades 3.0 came along, augmenting as I had the tortures of a multitude of lost souls?
But then I remembered: I was avoiding my own damnation. My motivation was enlightened self-interest, the fulcrum of a better world.
Harriet and I fucked in the production van while the inferno waned. The smell of cooking meat made us wildly hungry, and the late-August heat channeled the soot and ash that covered us into tiny black rivers of sweat. For a few minutes, we were demon lovers, savage and inhuman.
And Harriet wept, filthy and condemned, all the way back to Manhattan.
Despite ourselves, we'd gotten the footage we needed. Frame-by-frame analysis revealed how the pigflesh charred while the greedy napalm burned, the pigs' innards curling out to embrace the flame, providing fuel from within. My programmers refined the process to a simple algorithmic dance, which writhed in perpetuity like a blazing Jacob's ladder, an infinite meal encountered by a ceaseless appetite. Soon we had hellfire on tap.
It gave us all nightmares—even the programmers, who didn't know our client's business model. But it looked very good on TV.
· · · · ·
A few weeks of tweeking later, we were done.
The day we delivered, Harriet and I went out for a celebratory drink.
"Did the client pay you?" she asked.
I nodded. True to our contract's terms, I'd received a FedEx that afternoon, the Secret of Damnation printed out in a one-page summation no longer than a pitch for an action movie. The whole thing would have fit easily on one of those big-sized post-its. I had read it twice, then folded it up and carefully placed it in my breast pocket. I would burn it that night, after one more read. It seemed simple enough, but I didn't want any loopholes or trick language screwing up my trip to heaven.
"Yeah," I said. "The project's all done."
I'd already paid Harriet off with cash out of my own pocket, just like everyone else on the job. And a healthy bonus for not squealing to my partners that I was working on the side. But from the look in her eye, she wanted more now.
"Was it a lot of money?" she asked.
"Well, not money, really."
"I didn't think so."
I coughed into my beer. "You know I'm strictly non-disclosure on this."
"Of course."
We drank for a while. We were still lovers, but barely so. Nothing had ever come close to those minutes in New Jersey, enveloped by the grime of a new abyss.
"I think," she said, "that I'm finally going to take that vacation I keep talking about."
"Africa?" I said weakly, careful not to inflect my voice with any enthusiasm.
"Yeah," she said. "Africa. Just me, some paint and a few brushes. I'm going strictly analog for a year, maybe two. Like going native. No computers for a while."
"I see." I couldn't believe she was saying this, so soon after I'd read the Secret.
"No Photoshop, no modeling software. Just real objects to look at and to paint. Pigment and white canvas. Sky and landscapes."
"Sounds … nice," I said flatly.
"So," she asked, "is it simple?"
"Is what simple?"
"The Secret of Damnation."
My hand went to my breast pocket, a sinking feeling hitting me like the NASDAQ in freefall. "How the hell did you know about that?"
"He told me. He came to me and told me what he paid you."
"That fucker."
"So I want a percentage. Tell me the Secret."
"I can't."
"Just part of it. Give me a clue."
"I signed an NDA, Harriet. I can't even give you a hint. If I tell, I go to Hell."
She shrugged, laughed as if she'd only been kidding.
"Sorry. Didn't mean to put you in breach of contract." A pause, a wicked smile. "But it's pretty straightforward, right?"
"Harriet! Stop."
"But—"
"No hints, no adjectives, no information. Nada." I put my hands over my mouth.
"Okay," she said slowly, swirling one finger around the lip of her glass flirtatiously. "But if I was doing something, something bad? Bad enough to get me sent to Hell, for instance. Could you give me a sign?"
"Like scratch my nose with my right index finger?"
"Yeah, you could."
"No, I could not. Harriet, this is the Devil we're talking about," I said. "Not some jealous boyfriend I can hide from down in Miami. He's the Prince of Darkness, the Lord of Hades, and if I fuck up he'll come and carry me away screaming to Hell. You know, the one we just created?"
"Yeah, sure," she said. "Whatever."
A silent moment elapsed.
"But is it a big thing?" she asked playfully. "Or just a detail?"
I shut my eyes, locked both hands over my face. I didn't want any clues to pass over my visage—agreement or denial, warmer or colder. I tried to think of the latest virus hoax, the closing prices of Falling Man stock over the last week, anything to occlude the fatal knowledge in my mind.
Despite these efforts, I clearly remembered the Secret of Damnation. The simplicity of the idea, the easy charm of it. I could have explained it to Harriet in two minutes.
"Come on, relax," she said. "I don't believe any of it anyway."
"Yes, you do," I said from behind the curtain of my hands.
She snorted. "It's obvious what's going on here. This all just started out as self-indulgent therapy for you. You're a software über-geek who thought you were king of the world, until you almost died. Mortality wasn't pretty, and worse, it was way out of control. So you decided to deal with the post-traumatic stress the only way you know how. You decided to domesticate the afterlife into a software project. It's so predictable and lame. You hire a few coders and artists to put your near-death hallucination—clearly inspired by the Tribulation Alley burn—onto a nice, safe computer screen. There, you can adjust its frame rate and resolution, play with its aspect ratio and palette. Then you burn it onto a disk, and you think you've got eternal life now. It's pathetic. You've reduced heaven and hell to pixels, for God's sake."
"No," I insisted. "What we made, it's really Hell. I swear it is."
"It's nothing but a screen-saver!" she shouted. "By definition: some nice graphics that donothing!"
"Harriet, I instant-messaged you from beyond the grave, remember? And you just said that you met the Devil, for Pete's sake!"
"You messaged me from a County General Hospital in LA, you fuck. I checked the timing. You'd come out of your coma by the time I got your message."
"That's impossible."
"I called them. You were already ambulatory."
"They made a mistake. Or maybe it's a time zone thing. I woke up after I messaged you, I swear."
"LA's three hours behind us. Any mistake would have worked the other way around."
"What about the Devil? You said he appeared to you."
"The Devil, sure. You hired some cute actor—some very cute actor, I might add—to mess with my head. What, did you think I'd fuck you again for the Secret of Damnation? Was this whole thing a way to get in my pants from the beginning?"
"No, it was a way to get out of Hell."
She laughed again, but the sound was dry and ragged now. "Listen, I don't know whether you're pulling some elaborate hoax on me, or if you really believe all this. Either way, you're totally out of your mind. But I'll still take the bait, if that'll make you happy. Tell me, what's your idea of salvation?"
"Salvation?"
"Yes. Tell me what you
think goodness is. What do you think saves us, redeems us in the end? What's the Secret?"
"I'm not at liberty to disclose that."
"Fuck off."
"I told you, I signed an NDA!"
"I'm not buying that shit! There's no Devil, just you and your ego and your post traumatic paranoia. Let me help you."
"I'm not going to damn myself."
"Listen, I've been staring into your personal pit of evil for the last six weeks. I helped you visualize it, went there with you, even fucked you there. Aren't you cured yet?"
My reply was strangled by a whiff of sulphur.
"Show me the other side of you," she pleaded. "You saw Hell because when you almost died you realized there's this hole in your life. A stinking pit, right? So you worked through it onscreen. Good for you. And now this bogus Satan comes to tell me you've had a revelation. Fine, I want to hear it. But talk directly to me for once. Please. What's your Secret of Salvation?"
"I'll got to Hell if I tell you."
"You won't go to Hell just for talking to me, darling."
I covered my mouth again.
"Just talk to me!" a sob breaking her voice.
For the first time since we'd napalmed our sad little pigs, true anguish showed on Harriet's face. Like me, she had seen Hell, even if only on a screen. The brave new Hades 2.0, red in tooth and claw, every searing pixel of it. She had shaped and morphed it, tweeked and tweened it, wrangling every RGB value to its optimum. She had even felt it for a moment, out in our Jersey swamp, the heat and stench of that chemical fire as it consumed the offal we'd brought with us, body doubles for the damned.
Despite her words, I knew she now believed in Hell.
But unlike me, Harriet didn't know how to escape. She lacked my trick, my Secret, my certainty of heaven. And she must have known that she was damned as I had been.
She rose from her chair angrily, slammed a twenty on the table, and stood.