A Short Stay in Hell

by Steven L. Peck

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

Could I pray in Hell? Could I pray my way out of Hell? Who was I praying to now?

Somehow I had always assumed going to the bathroom was something of such an earthly nature that it would be unnecessary in the afterlife. There were to be many surprises.

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

“Strange Hell,” he said, motioning to the people on the other side of the chasm. “Not what I expected,” I agreed. “Not Zoroastrian either then?” “Mormon.” “Ah. I was agnostic, so of course I wasn’t thinking of this as the final ending,” he said, waving his arm around randomly.

had died young and never really felt I had matured. I remember my own father, a real man of the house, someone who knew what it was to be a man. He radiated confidence. I never felt like that. I felt as if I were an imposter all the time I was raising my kids. I felt lost and helpless.

My dad was still living when I died. I hope he ends up in a nice Hell.

What creatures of habit we are. After only a few nights in Hell we had settled into a comfortable routine.

I suppose what I really wondered was whether my wife was hidden somewhere in the vast reaches of this building. Maybe she had lived out her life and died and come to this same strange place. Maybe I could find her.

Everyone laughed and patted me on the back. They all congratulated the Mormon boy for breaking with his past. 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 Hell was really all a ruse concocted by God to see what I was made of? But no, there was something real and final about this Hell. I can’t describe it, but there was a deep sense that this was more real than anything I had experienced on earth.

This reality carried with it a profound sense of itself – a deep sense that this Hell was indeed just what it seemed to be. There was a truth in it that denied second-guessing.

I walked back out and held what I would learn to call the usual conversation. Who I was. Where I had lived my life. What wonderful things I had accomplished. The things that had been left undone. Who I missed and what I should have done differently and, finally, how I died.

Sometimes I thought I could see it, but it never appeared, and really I could not see anything but a vanishing point far in the distance. Straight on the shelves ran until they disappeared into a tiny point that never changed, never gave a hint that I was approaching an end. For three weeks I ran, covering I estimate about fourteen hundred miles, and nothing ever changed.

began to think how strange it seemed that I never met a single person of color. Not an Asian, not a black person, not a Hispanic, not anything but a sea of white American Caucasians. Was there no diversity in Hell?

was a bit of a celebrity. I had traveled thousands of miles, and everyone wanted to hear my story. The infuriating thing was, there was really nothing to tell.

One man, a newcomer I did not recognize, said, “There’s only one thing that explains it – the rest of you aren’t real – mere creations like the books. My soul is probably in a vat somewhere being pumped full of sensations. You, you, and you,” he said, pointing at three of us, “are nothing more than input signals to a single consciousness swimming in a God-created void.”

She trailed off, and I was silent awhile. My lust seemed to have disappeared as she became a real person and not just a red-headed object with a nice face.

Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? 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 does bring a modicum of hope.” “Yes, it does … and maybe some despair.”

knew what despair she was talking about. This tiny nonsensical sentence was all that a group of over seventy-five people could show for a hundred years of effort.

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.

A book on our life? There must be billions of such books. In what detail? From whose perspective? A book on every second of our life would take volumes. A book about my life from my own perspective would be very different from that of an observer who loved me, or from one who hated me. Which book is the right one?” I was venting, but I could not seem to stop. So many irritations in this place, so many endless, meaningless frustrations.

“During my earth life, I believed I would live with my precious wife forever. I believed I would one day be a God. I believed in doing good to my neighbor. I did my home teaching. I paid my tithing. I served in my calling in church. That God made more sense than this ever could, and yet do I wake up in the Celestial Kingdom surrounded by my departed family and friends? No, I find myself on a folding chair in the office of some demon sitting behind a desk with a vision of people burning in Hell in the window behind him. So all my beliefs disappeared then. Why should I trust things now?

Who knows, maybe in a hundred billion years I’ll find my book. I’ll stick it in the slot and boom, I’ll find out that, no, Zoroastrianism isn’t the truth either, but it was really the Baptists who were right all along and this is just part of God’s preliminary salvo into an eternity of horrors. So it’s bam, splash, and I find myself in a sea of boiling sulfur. Or maybe this is some strange philosopher’s Hell where we have to experience every possible Hell that can or has ever been...

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. We’re all white, equal ciphers, instances of the same absurdity repeated over and over. We try to scratch some hope or meaning out of it with our university, but ultimately there is nothing to attach meaning to. We’re damned.”

“Well, at least I can enjoy a steak. I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with a cow. How could it?”

In Hell there was no sense of place, because all places were the same. Uniform monotony. A place without place. A place without context. But, here, now, I could rub her hand and she would sigh. She was a difference. Perhaps each person was the only difference in all these halls of unchanging ranks of books, kiosks, clocks, and carpet, and that, and that, at least, we had to hold to.

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.

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.

I saw one man being beaten by several others. They beat him until he fell to the ground, where they kicked him until he was dead. There seemed to be no malice in their actions. It was as if they were almost bored, going through a morning ritual that needed to be done, like brushing their hair or ordering a meal from the kiosk.

“You’ll get used to it. Their screams, I mean. It’s all God’s work.” He looked uncomfortable for a moment then turned away. He stood in silence for a minute and then turned to me again.

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. Once I hit bottom, I planned to climb back up with Rachel and jump again.

As complete darkness gathered around me, I had a strange feeling of safety. I stayed awake for hours, but just before dawn, that inevitable moment through which no one in Hell has ever been able to stay awake, that strange hour when books are returned, the dead revived, and all wounds healed – I fell asleep and did not wake until the turning on of the lights.

Dire Dan was gone. I was never to see him again. Nor has anyone I have ever met since. He, like me, is lost in the library. Alone. I wonder, does he still feel he is the fist of God?

Finally I must have died of thirst, because I woke one morning feeling great.

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.

The clomping of my feet climbing up the steps reminded me of the poverty of sensation we endured here. But on I climbed, dreaming of meeting a man or a woman from India who knew some songs I could not repeat ad nauseam.

I hesitated. “I was just wondering about the … sorrow.” He laughed at me and threw pages torn from a book at me. The margins were cluttered with charcoal equations, scratched out using a sharpened bone and something burnt from the kiosk. “Look at these. It will answer your question. Look at them and weep, because they are going to tell you exactly what it means to be in this Hell. Look! Look!”

He laughed bitterly. “Well if you were somewhere near the middle of Hell, you only have ten to the one million two hundred ninety-seven thousand three hundred seventy-seventh light years to go.” I’ll never forget his cold laugh. “You have over a million more orders of magnitude light-years to fall than there were electrons in our old universe.” I fell back. “Rachel!” I cried out. “I’ll never get to the bottom.” The man shook his head in disgust. “Oh. You’ll reach bottom,” he laughed bitterly, “just not for a very, very long time.”

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.

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.

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

I ceased to think, to perceive. I was no more aware of my existence than a snail or even an amoeba might be.

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.

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.