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.

After a week of being in this place, I also wanted to see how many people were here. I thought it strange we’d only found other white people, that all of us spoke English, and that all of us made reference only to things we all understood. As far as we had been able to gather from the group around our area, we had all died within sixty years of each other. I was curious if this held throughout the library.

The difference in the quality of consciousness between dreaming and being awake was close to the difference between our old earth life and the one there. 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.

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?

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.”