A Short Stay in Hell

by Steven L. Peck

“Well, there’s your problem. You didn’t join the one true religion.” “What? I’m telling you, I was a Christian. I read the Bible every day. I donated money to the TV evangelists every Sunday. And I was saved.” “No. Sorry. The true religion is Zoroastrianism, I’m afraid. Bit of bad luck there.

If you’re not a Zoroastrian, I’m afraid you are bound for Hell.” The man looked stunned and shocked. “It’s not fair.” The demon gave a mirthful laugh. “Well, it was fair when you were sending all the Chinese to Hell who had never heard of Jesus.

Do you have any idea how long eternity is? My heavens, what an imagination you humans have. What kind of God would leave you burning forever?

We keep the office windows showing that scene just to get the new arrivals to take things seriously. Those are all actors. They get off in about a half hour.

“Injustice?” queried the demon sarcastically. “You were never concerned with justice a day in your life except when it was in your favor.

After this long I am not bitter – I barely feel at all.

This Hell did not fit anywhere in my belief system.

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

I finished the cup, but I felt like I had betrayed something deep within me. Only a little over a week in Hell and I had abandoned a lifelong belief. What if this was just some sort of trial God had arranged to test my backbone?

My lust seemed to have disappeared as she became a real person and not just a red-headed object with a nice face.

How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle. I still remember the deep sense of loss.

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.

The absurdity of it has never left me. We can’t care about anything here. We can’t make a difference – all meaning has been subtracted, we don’t know where anything comes from or where it goes. There’s no context for our lives.

In Hell there was no sense of place, because all places were the same. Uniform monotony. A place without place. A place without context.

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.

In our 708th year together, we started an elaborate game of tag that involved hundreds of people and lasted for over twelve years.

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.

THINGS STARTED TO FALL APART when Dire Dan, “the prophet of doom and truth,” grew in popularity and established a following of several ten thousand men and a handful of women.

I will not sicken you with all his words. He was arrogant, full of his own importance. He could speak of nothing but his glory in the world to come. It was mad. Was madness possible here? Apparently.

It was a strange feeling, falling for so long. The wind roared in my ears, but there was a peace to it, a relaxing sense of freedom I’d never known before. I was enjoying it, I had to admit. Enjoying it immensely. New experiences in Hell were few and far between, and I was having a ball.

The never-ending sameness of all those I knew somehow blended with the sameness of this Hell. The same rooms, the same railings, the same kiosks, the same bedrooms with the same bathrooms, the same signs, with the same rug, and the endless stacks of books all bound with unerring sameness, seemed to match the sameness of the people, all white, all American, all died between 1939 and 2043, the same outlooks, the same haircuts, the same maddening habits. Homogeneity everywhere, endlessly stretching into an eternity of monotony.

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.

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.

What is love that it has such power?

Finite does not mean much if you can’t tell any practical difference between it and infinite.

Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope.

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.