A Short Stay in Hell

by Steven L. Peck

Lastly, you are here to learn something. Don’t try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.

“Could I get a diet Coke, too?” It appeared likewise and looked and tasted like a diet Coke.

How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning – that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.

Have you ever loved someone for a thousand years? I would have bet it impossible, but that’s how long we were together. A thousand years we traveled the halls of Hell together. I don’t remember fighting. She was magic. Nights were wondrous. Days full of laughter and long, slow conversations. Once for fifty years we discussed dogs and decided to spend a few years pretending we were dogs, running on all fours and eating only dog food out of a dish, or occasionally gnawing on a meaty bone. Oddly enough, it caught on and several people joined our pack. We pulled the mattresses down off the beds with our teeth and slept on the floor.

We were a team, Rachel and I. Oh, I miss her so much. I think our love could have lasted forever. I’m sure it would have. She was so … no, I won’t cheapen it by trying to express it in words and short sentences. I loved her. That is enough.

Rachel turned to me. She seemed surprisingly calm. “I love you,” she said, a beautiful smile on her face. Then she climbed up the railing and jumped. Several arms reached out to stop her, to hold her back, but they were too late. Many arms grabbed me, however, and held me fast against the railing. I watched her fall. She did not scream, she just fell downward, down, down, and down. The Direites all watched with gleeful cheers and laughter as she got smaller and smaller, until as an infinitesimal dot she merged with the ever-present vanishing point and winked out of my existence. My only joy was gone. “I love you too,” I said to the empty air below me. I was hit over the head with a bone and saw nothing but blackness.

Homogeneity everywhere, endlessly stretching into an eternity of monotony.

I dared wonder if I might have come to a new part of the library. Perhaps this was where the Chinese were kept!

But somehow I feared the defining point of this Hell was its unrelenting uniformity, its lack of variation from type. If there was a heaven at the end of this, it must be filled with great variety, perhaps a multiplicity of intelligent species spread across universes. Yes, heaven would be as full of difference as Hell was of sameness.

variegation

“Ninety-five raised to the one million three hundred twelve thousandth power.” “That’s a lot. Right?” “You don’t understand. In our old universe there were only ten raised to the seventy-eighth electrons.” “You mean there are more books in this library than there were electrons in our whole previous universe?”

It seems odd to me now that after so long I still focus on a time so brief as to be but a fraction of an instant in the time I will be here, but so powerfully has that instant rooted into me that I hold onto it with a hopeless desperation. Ages of universes pass while I look at books of nonsense, yet I think on and on of a love so far in the past it is incomprehensible to believe it was even real.

What is love that it has such power? Whatever it is, it seems unlikely this God who placed me here knows anything about it. If it loved me in the least, could it inflict what it has upon me? Who can understand? Once I feared to say such things, dreading a worse punishment. But what worse fate could there be? To remember love and know it is unattainable? To know love wanders somewhere light-years and light-years distant, ever knowing it is forever out of reach? Forever hidden?

For eons I fell. Every morning I awoke, plunged the knife into my neck, and awoke the next morning only to do the same again. Over and over, every day. Sometimes I would stay awake for an hour or so, but then boredom would set in and I would use the bone knife again.

Then came centuries of agonizing thought. I knew I had not even fallen a light-year yet. I had googols and googols of light-years to go. There is a despair that goes deeper than existence; it runs to the marrow of consciousness, to the seat of the soul. Could I keep living like this forever? How could I continue existing in this Hell? And yet there was no choice.

Existence goes on and on here. Finite does not mean much if you can’t tell any practical differe...

“I’ll wait a hundred years if I have to,” she said, smiling mischievously, and kissed me hard on the mouth.

Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair.

After a billion years there is nothing left to say, and you wander apart, uncaring in the end. The hope of a human relationship no longer carries any depth or weight for me, and all meaning has faded long ago into an endless grey nothingness.

Now the search is all that matters. I know there will come a time when I find my book, but it is far in the future. And I know without doubt that it will not be today. Yet a strange hope remains. A hope that somehow, something, God, the demon, Ahura Mazda, someone, will see I’m trying. I’m really trying, and that will be enough.