The Divine Farce (LeapLit)

by Michael S.A. Graziano

None of us could hear any indication of a hollow space behind the wall. Its solidity was so absolute that I lost the ability to imagine emptiness outside our microcosm. In my mind the universe was filled up infinitely with concrete, and at its center was one tiny bubble in which our randomly assorted souls had been entombed.

For a long time, I wondered if we were in heaven. An institutional heaven, with limited resources, that had slotted us into the only available accommodation. I imagined that the universal block of concrete was honeycombed with compartments, billions for the ten billion people who had ever lived and died, each stall crammed to capacity with one or two or three souls. A brilliant organizational trick, it was applied game theory. A person alone—hell. No matter how deeply reflective, no matter how self sufficient—eternal solitude—hell. Two people—as good as hell. Three people, a triangulated complexity, strife and forgiveness, alliance and conflict, a polyphonic piece of music sometimes dreadful in its dissonance, sometimes uplifting in its harmony—heaven. My optimistic theory was that any three people, crammed together for a long enough time, would eventually find a mutual harmony. The rules of heaven were minimalist. They were elegant.

The divine intelligence, if there was one, had a cruel sense of humor, waiting patiently until we had lost any concept of freedom, until we had become connoisseurs of our prison, until we had gone beyond resignation and had achieved wholesale emotional dependence on each other and on the feel of each other’s bodies, until we had turned our predicament into a philosophy and a cosmology, until we didn’t know anymore whether we wanted to stay or leave. Then it gave us a weakness in the wall.

I had never felt so empty, both gastrically and emotionally. I had helped to knock a hole in heaven. I had walked away from it much too eagerly, and now I felt more sad for it than for me. I felt sad it was over, as if our triangulated love was a thing with a soul, and now it was dead, and only the valueless components were left, hopelessly scattered.

They were no better than anyone else, no more lovely than the thousand other people I saw every moment, no less filthy, but all the same they were themselves, they were special because I knew them,

The strangeness of the place began to dawn on me. We were so driven by hunger and thirst, and so isolated from each other by the constant mixing of the crowd, and so numbed by the repetition of caverns and food troughs and rusty water pipes and perpetual battle, and so gratified at each orgiastic meal, that we had lost all our capacity for imagination. For vision.

For the death of me, I couldn’t tell whether the place was intended to be heaven or hell. To the extent that heaven above is isolation, it seems to be hell. To the extent that hell below is a crowd, it apparently is heaven. Maybe we are condemned to an endless nagging sense of discomfort balanced against comfort, satisfaction against the itch to escape.