Heck, Part I
That's what she'd said: "Kill yourself." The pale face had popped out of a hole in the ground, no neck or anything, and told Jerry to commit suicide. Then she receded into the dirt.
Being in hell wasn't awful, he thought. Some people were nice. But then you had rude, moonlike heads with luscious hair who insulted you without any warning. His mother hadn't prepared him for that.
"Always eat potatoes," his mother had said. "No matter what." And he had listened! So many boiled, baked, fried-up spuds. He'd even eaten them raw on many occasions, although these had made him sick. But what did he care? Life was sick and baggy, like a grandfather in sweatpants.
Hell, where Jerry lived, looked like the suburbs: a denuded landscape pitted with businesses whose titles reflected a sensibility less vulgar than merely uncaring: Nail Place, Fashion Bag, Nail Palace, Bub's Grocery. Well, Bub's Grocery was nice. He went there now for a danish, skirting a fat woman with tentacles for breasts.
"Excuse me," he said.
Fluorescent lights sparred overhead with flashes and sparks. Dead bugs collected in their plastic bellies, were cleaned out once a year when the Fly came around with his leather bag, scooping the burnt unloved carcasses inside and taking them over to the pit behind Chili's, where he would weep and rend his exoskeleton and chant passages from the Upanishads on his knees before dumping the dead ones into the hole. Sometimes Jerry came and watched, for solidarity.
"9.99," said Bub. Jerry looked at her.
"It was 5 yesterday."
Bub didn't answer. If she wanted, she could shoot you full of rock salt and have one of her ten sons dismember you with a rake. But she liked Jerry.
He forked over the cash. Of course they used dollars in Hell; it was only practical, with the relatively loose visa laws between nations.
Outside, Jerry sat on a massive whale carcass and ate his pastry. The blubbery reek bothered him little; when he was young, his sister Debra had slashed him in the face with a paring knife, and after that bad smells had stopped smelling like themselves.
"Delicious," he said. In the center was the cheesy goop he rather liked. He shut his eyes, rocked back and forth on his butt, and felt the wind on his jeans.
Five hundred fiery dog-bats tied together with chickenwire struggled and flapped overhead. Jerry could hear their cute straining squeaks.
"Must be the Koolepper boy," he said. The Kooleppers let their kid Dale do whatever he wanted, because he was starting pitcher on the baseball team at Actython P. Harris Middle School, which brought to the community's name all the violent, pathetic prestige that attends such talent.
Jerry flung his wrapper on the ground and watched it crumble into cinders. Hell was outstanding at waste management.
He strode along the Pyx River towards the Kooleppers, savoring the pops of boiling gas that emanated from the water. He breathed in strongly through his nose and then belched, because he was alone, because his girlfriend wasn't around to correct him.
The sun was a gauzy tan egg in the sky, mostly because it wasn't a sun but a deathless, luminous egg left by the White Dragon Billfried as a gift to this arrondissement of Hell. Each neighborhood got its own source of light, not all from Billfried, of course, because he only spat out unfertilized ova when he felt like it, and he was rarely motivated to do anything anymore because of his depression.
Jerry was interrupted in his stroll by a weeping, castrated wolf who continually vomited forth involuntary abortions. He wrinkled his nose at the trail of slick, hairless pups in their curled poses, but didn't smell anything negative.
"Bayliss dog got out again," he mused.
"Skewer thee, ancient catamite, false Christ of Gethsamane!" said the wolf, its eyes bleeding tears the color of charred flesh.
Jerry made cute kissing sounds and approached the wolf from windward, stroking the soft, silver fur between his eyes until he sat down.
"Good boy."
The wolf gagged as a last embryo slid past his jaws, then got down on its belly and whimpered, softly. Jerry took some care in avoiding the viscous grave while he scratched the Bayliss dog behind the ears, along his spine, up and down his great, muscled flanks. He felt peaceful.
"Sweet deal, huh?" he said. The wolf yipped like a child imitating a wolf. Then Jerry said, "Go on home, boy," and patted the creature lightly on the side, and the wolf trotted off, no longer crying.
Jerry felt happier, but he also acknowledged a sweet, tender sadness spreading through his breast like a tea stain. He sat down on the banks of the Pyx and wiped some dust on his hands and watched a lone woman, encased in chrome, unable to move, yet balanced in a perfect surfer's position on a translucent board, coast by on the roiling surface of the water.
"Good morning, Brenda!" he yelled.
Brenda could not respond with words, but he felt a sharp pain behind his eyes that meant she had heard him speak. Jerry smiled, no longer sad. He watched that fantastic, frictionless disc of hers propel her downstream: it was said the red arterial structures bobbing inside were the blood vessels of people she had lied to, and who had later destroyed their families: it was said Brenda had been a real beauty on Earth, but had wielded her gift like a Scythian bow. Jerry was half in love with Brenda, like everyone else, but he could never touch or approach her.
Moving on, he veered away from the water towards the city. Even from this distance across the waste he could see the billboards advertising plague unguent, plus the churlish dome of the US Capitol, which had also gone to Hell, and deserved it, as well as ziggurats from the Aztec Empire. The Aztecs and Assyrians got along rather well, although once in a while they flayed each other alive. Then they went and had a beer together.
Jerry pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit it a tad furtively; his girlfriend disapproved of his smoking, and because she had spies in the region, it was a risk to injure his lungs so close to civilization. Still, he felt he needed one after seeing Brenda.
Jerry smoked Marlboro Skylines, which were city cigarettes, even though he had grown up and even died on a farm. But he lived in a city now, right? Basinski was the biggest of them all -- or not the biggest, for that honor fell to Penderecki -- but it was the most powerful, the seat of government in Hell, and it was a great melting pot of every time, place, region, creed, and culture. Predictably, people maimed and swindled each other without pause, although of course many neighbors were cordial and even gracious in their own ways. Jerry liked to think of himself as one of those.
The ghastly female head erupted from the soil once again and screamed, "Kill yourself!" Jerry stopped in his tracks and beheld the full, incarnadine lips, the painted eyes with their irises burnt amber, and the dark, straight, long hair that ended just above the ground. He had hardly time for a single puff on his Skyline before the head receded once again.
"Jeez," said Jerry, and crushed out his smoke in agitation. He pulled out instead a mint and started to suck on that, hands in his pockets, boots scuffed with the dust of the ever-expanding desert that made up the environs around Basinski. All the time the billboard proclaiming: "Fuck the Hague! Get rid of the plague," with a picture of a white man torching the International Court of Justice while smiling confidently, upright, buber-free. Above the carnage were the words in uppercase white: CLOROX BLEACH.
Jerry shuddered. Before his walk, the sign had just said MARCO RUBIO, which meant he mayor must be angry at him.
Back in town, he stopped by at his friend Lorraine's apartment for some coffee. She buzzed him in, and he climbed the nine flights of rank, claustrophobic stairs, passing children slicing up their arms with sharp can tops, and at least three breathing versions of Kirby, the pink puffball Nintendo character.
"Want a blowjob?" the last Kirby said.
"No thanks," said Jerry.
The Kirby laughed harshly and squatted among its fetid rags and lit a crack pipe. He passed the flame of his lighter in slow, mesmeric figure-eights around the metal bowl's bottom and breathed in with the force of a hurricane, yanking Jerry a foot or so towards him and making the nubs of rock vaporize down the clear glass tube. "You don't look like you have any good powers anyway."
Jerry smiled, encouragingly, he thought. "I know how to milk a cow."
The Kirby reeled back in disgust and spit on the concrete. "Get lost, you fucking pervert."
Jerry shrugged and continued his climb to Floor 9. He found the door open and waiting for him, the smell of coffee filling his heart with delight. Good smells he could have.
"You want some biscotti?" called Lorraine from the kitchen. She was a hideous white grub the size of a small horse, and her face was brown, hard, with restless mouthparts. She never wanted for a boyfriend, and even now had at least three suitors constantly texting her or DMing her nudes.
"I'd sure love some," said Jerry, and sat at the table in front of the TV, which was playing a rerun of Seinfeld, the episode in which Jerry ritualistically disembowels Kramer with a butcher's knife while George chokes himself with a bike chain and gets off to it, sexually. Elaine tries to decide if she should be herself on a date or pretend she's a florist.
Lorraine set two steaming mugs of coffee down, as well as a plate of chocolate-dipped biscotti. The two of them munched and drank in silence for a few minutes before the whine of an airplane drew them out of their own reveries.
"You think I should dump Greg?" Lorraine asked.
"Do you like Greg?"
Lorraine rolled her eyes, of which she had several. The bristles alongside her thick, tubular body wriggled in indecision. "Well ... "
Jerry spread his free palm out to his side and raised his eyebrows. "Isn't that your answer?"
"Sure, but you can't just decide like that, right? It's so boring."
Jerry dipped his snack into his drink and wicked it out before it could get too soggy and crumble into the mug. He was an expert at letting it soak up the maximum amount of fluid without compromising the structural integrity of the Italian double-baked bread dessert.
"Life can be boring. Sometimes boring's good."
Lorraine sighed in mock-exasperation and leaned back in her seat. "God, you're so white. I love you but you're like fucking Steppenwolf's neighbor."
"How's he doing, by the way?" said Jerry.
"Oh ... " Convulsing her smooth, translucent segments. "Just wandering around, lamenting in German. He thinks he knows someone who can smuggle him into Purgatory."
Jerry creased his brow and lit another cigarette, not afraid of spies here. "Who'd want to go to Limbo?"
Lorraine stared at him, deadpan, which was easy with a face that could really only clack its pincered jaws, and they both broke into long, porous laughter.
"Well, I better be going," said Jerry, dusting his pants and easing himself upright. Even standing, he was barely taller than Lorraine while she was sitting down.
Lorraine fixed him with her compound eyes and smiled, or performed what Jerry thought was a smile. Non-prehensile mouth appendages could be surprisingly emotive once you got to know someone.
Being in hell wasn't awful, he thought. Some people were nice. But then you had rude, moonlike heads with luscious hair who insulted you without any warning. His mother hadn't prepared him for that.
"Always eat potatoes," his mother had said. "No matter what." And he had listened! So many boiled, baked, fried-up spuds. He'd even eaten them raw on many occasions, although these had made him sick. But what did he care? Life was sick and baggy, like a grandfather in sweatpants.
Hell, where Jerry lived, looked like the suburbs: a denuded landscape pitted with businesses whose titles reflected a sensibility less vulgar than merely uncaring: Nail Place, Fashion Bag, Nail Palace, Bub's Grocery. Well, Bub's Grocery was nice. He went there now for a danish, skirting a fat woman with tentacles for breasts.
"Excuse me," he said.
Fluorescent lights sparred overhead with flashes and sparks. Dead bugs collected in their plastic bellies, were cleaned out once a year when the Fly came around with his leather bag, scooping the burnt unloved carcasses inside and taking them over to the pit behind Chili's, where he would weep and rend his exoskeleton and chant passages from the Upanishads on his knees before dumping the dead ones into the hole. Sometimes Jerry came and watched, for solidarity.
"9.99," said Bub. Jerry looked at her.
"It was 5 yesterday."
Bub didn't answer. If she wanted, she could shoot you full of rock salt and have one of her ten sons dismember you with a rake. But she liked Jerry.
He forked over the cash. Of course they used dollars in Hell; it was only practical, with the relatively loose visa laws between nations.
Outside, Jerry sat on a massive whale carcass and ate his pastry. The blubbery reek bothered him little; when he was young, his sister Debra had slashed him in the face with a paring knife, and after that bad smells had stopped smelling like themselves.
"Delicious," he said. In the center was the cheesy goop he rather liked. He shut his eyes, rocked back and forth on his butt, and felt the wind on his jeans.
Five hundred fiery dog-bats tied together with chickenwire struggled and flapped overhead. Jerry could hear their cute straining squeaks.
"Must be the Koolepper boy," he said. The Kooleppers let their kid Dale do whatever he wanted, because he was starting pitcher on the baseball team at Actython P. Harris Middle School, which brought to the community's name all the violent, pathetic prestige that attends such talent.
Jerry flung his wrapper on the ground and watched it crumble into cinders. Hell was outstanding at waste management.
He strode along the Pyx River towards the Kooleppers, savoring the pops of boiling gas that emanated from the water. He breathed in strongly through his nose and then belched, because he was alone, because his girlfriend wasn't around to correct him.
The sun was a gauzy tan egg in the sky, mostly because it wasn't a sun but a deathless, luminous egg left by the White Dragon Billfried as a gift to this arrondissement of Hell. Each neighborhood got its own source of light, not all from Billfried, of course, because he only spat out unfertilized ova when he felt like it, and he was rarely motivated to do anything anymore because of his depression.
Jerry was interrupted in his stroll by a weeping, castrated wolf who continually vomited forth involuntary abortions. He wrinkled his nose at the trail of slick, hairless pups in their curled poses, but didn't smell anything negative.
"Bayliss dog got out again," he mused.
"Skewer thee, ancient catamite, false Christ of Gethsamane!" said the wolf, its eyes bleeding tears the color of charred flesh.
Jerry made cute kissing sounds and approached the wolf from windward, stroking the soft, silver fur between his eyes until he sat down.
"Good boy."
The wolf gagged as a last embryo slid past his jaws, then got down on its belly and whimpered, softly. Jerry took some care in avoiding the viscous grave while he scratched the Bayliss dog behind the ears, along his spine, up and down his great, muscled flanks. He felt peaceful.
"Sweet deal, huh?" he said. The wolf yipped like a child imitating a wolf. Then Jerry said, "Go on home, boy," and patted the creature lightly on the side, and the wolf trotted off, no longer crying.
Jerry felt happier, but he also acknowledged a sweet, tender sadness spreading through his breast like a tea stain. He sat down on the banks of the Pyx and wiped some dust on his hands and watched a lone woman, encased in chrome, unable to move, yet balanced in a perfect surfer's position on a translucent board, coast by on the roiling surface of the water.
"Good morning, Brenda!" he yelled.
Brenda could not respond with words, but he felt a sharp pain behind his eyes that meant she had heard him speak. Jerry smiled, no longer sad. He watched that fantastic, frictionless disc of hers propel her downstream: it was said the red arterial structures bobbing inside were the blood vessels of people she had lied to, and who had later destroyed their families: it was said Brenda had been a real beauty on Earth, but had wielded her gift like a Scythian bow. Jerry was half in love with Brenda, like everyone else, but he could never touch or approach her.
Moving on, he veered away from the water towards the city. Even from this distance across the waste he could see the billboards advertising plague unguent, plus the churlish dome of the US Capitol, which had also gone to Hell, and deserved it, as well as ziggurats from the Aztec Empire. The Aztecs and Assyrians got along rather well, although once in a while they flayed each other alive. Then they went and had a beer together.
Jerry pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit it a tad furtively; his girlfriend disapproved of his smoking, and because she had spies in the region, it was a risk to injure his lungs so close to civilization. Still, he felt he needed one after seeing Brenda.
Jerry smoked Marlboro Skylines, which were city cigarettes, even though he had grown up and even died on a farm. But he lived in a city now, right? Basinski was the biggest of them all -- or not the biggest, for that honor fell to Penderecki -- but it was the most powerful, the seat of government in Hell, and it was a great melting pot of every time, place, region, creed, and culture. Predictably, people maimed and swindled each other without pause, although of course many neighbors were cordial and even gracious in their own ways. Jerry liked to think of himself as one of those.
The ghastly female head erupted from the soil once again and screamed, "Kill yourself!" Jerry stopped in his tracks and beheld the full, incarnadine lips, the painted eyes with their irises burnt amber, and the dark, straight, long hair that ended just above the ground. He had hardly time for a single puff on his Skyline before the head receded once again.
"Jeez," said Jerry, and crushed out his smoke in agitation. He pulled out instead a mint and started to suck on that, hands in his pockets, boots scuffed with the dust of the ever-expanding desert that made up the environs around Basinski. All the time the billboard proclaiming: "Fuck the Hague! Get rid of the plague," with a picture of a white man torching the International Court of Justice while smiling confidently, upright, buber-free. Above the carnage were the words in uppercase white: CLOROX BLEACH.
Jerry shuddered. Before his walk, the sign had just said MARCO RUBIO, which meant he mayor must be angry at him.
Back in town, he stopped by at his friend Lorraine's apartment for some coffee. She buzzed him in, and he climbed the nine flights of rank, claustrophobic stairs, passing children slicing up their arms with sharp can tops, and at least three breathing versions of Kirby, the pink puffball Nintendo character.
"Want a blowjob?" the last Kirby said.
"No thanks," said Jerry.
The Kirby laughed harshly and squatted among its fetid rags and lit a crack pipe. He passed the flame of his lighter in slow, mesmeric figure-eights around the metal bowl's bottom and breathed in with the force of a hurricane, yanking Jerry a foot or so towards him and making the nubs of rock vaporize down the clear glass tube. "You don't look like you have any good powers anyway."
Jerry smiled, encouragingly, he thought. "I know how to milk a cow."
The Kirby reeled back in disgust and spit on the concrete. "Get lost, you fucking pervert."
Jerry shrugged and continued his climb to Floor 9. He found the door open and waiting for him, the smell of coffee filling his heart with delight. Good smells he could have.
"You want some biscotti?" called Lorraine from the kitchen. She was a hideous white grub the size of a small horse, and her face was brown, hard, with restless mouthparts. She never wanted for a boyfriend, and even now had at least three suitors constantly texting her or DMing her nudes.
"I'd sure love some," said Jerry, and sat at the table in front of the TV, which was playing a rerun of Seinfeld, the episode in which Jerry ritualistically disembowels Kramer with a butcher's knife while George chokes himself with a bike chain and gets off to it, sexually. Elaine tries to decide if she should be herself on a date or pretend she's a florist.
Lorraine set two steaming mugs of coffee down, as well as a plate of chocolate-dipped biscotti. The two of them munched and drank in silence for a few minutes before the whine of an airplane drew them out of their own reveries.
"You think I should dump Greg?" Lorraine asked.
"Do you like Greg?"
Lorraine rolled her eyes, of which she had several. The bristles alongside her thick, tubular body wriggled in indecision. "Well ... "
Jerry spread his free palm out to his side and raised his eyebrows. "Isn't that your answer?"
"Sure, but you can't just decide like that, right? It's so boring."
Jerry dipped his snack into his drink and wicked it out before it could get too soggy and crumble into the mug. He was an expert at letting it soak up the maximum amount of fluid without compromising the structural integrity of the Italian double-baked bread dessert.
"Life can be boring. Sometimes boring's good."
Lorraine sighed in mock-exasperation and leaned back in her seat. "God, you're so white. I love you but you're like fucking Steppenwolf's neighbor."
"How's he doing, by the way?" said Jerry.
"Oh ... " Convulsing her smooth, translucent segments. "Just wandering around, lamenting in German. He thinks he knows someone who can smuggle him into Purgatory."
Jerry creased his brow and lit another cigarette, not afraid of spies here. "Who'd want to go to Limbo?"
Lorraine stared at him, deadpan, which was easy with a face that could really only clack its pincered jaws, and they both broke into long, porous laughter.
"Well, I better be going," said Jerry, dusting his pants and easing himself upright. Even standing, he was barely taller than Lorraine while she was sitting down.
Lorraine fixed him with her compound eyes and smiled, or performed what Jerry thought was a smile. Non-prehensile mouth appendages could be surprisingly emotive once you got to know someone.
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