A Short Stay in Hell (2 page)

“
No. Sorry. The true religion is
Zoroastrianism, I’m afraid. Bit of bad luck there. Christianity
certainly borrowed a great deal from the one true religion, but not
enough, unfortunately. Not nearly enough.”

“
Zoor-what-ism? Never heard of it. How can
that be the true religion?” The man looked confused.

“
Zoroastrianism? Oh, there’s never been
but a few hundred thousand of them at any one time, mostly located
in Iran and India, but that’s it. The one true faith. 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. Wasn’t it? And what a cruel and vicious Hell
it was. And your Hell was not our short little correct-you-a-little
Hell. This was eternal damnation. At least in the true
Zoroastrianism system you eventually get out of Hell. 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? Most
of you wouldn’t do that to a neighbor’s dog, even if it barked
incessantly at two a.m. every morning. After about ten minutes
watching a dog suffer in the kind of Hell you imagined God was
going send his wicked children to, you would be pleading for the
damned beast’s mercy. It’s crazy. Create a few beings; those that
don’t obey you roast forever? Give me a break.” The demon shook his
great head in wonder.

One of the women, a pretty girl with short
red hair, raised her hand. “You mean we won’t be in Hell
forever?”

The Demon laughed. “Of course not. Of course
not. Hell is for your edification and wisdom. Punishment? Yes. But
not forever.”

“
So those people will get out?” the woman
continued, pointing shakily to those in agony outside the
window.

The demon considered for a moment. “I
probably shouldn’t tell you this … well, no harm’s done, I’ve never
really agreed with the policy anyway … but that’s all just
make-believe. 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. So … anyway, we’d better
push on.”

The humans seemed confused.

The demon rose to his feet. “Well, Lester
the Christian, where shall we send you?”

“
This isn’t right,” he screamed.

The demon was ignoring his tantrum. He began
tapping his handheld device. “No … no, that’s not it, no, no …
maybe, no, ah! No, I shouldn’t, but … no, that’s too cruel … I
really shouldn’t.”

Suddenly he gave a chuckle and sighed. “Oh,
why not? The Great God created irony too.”

Lester by this time was screaming at the top
of his lungs about the injustice of it all.

“
Injustice?” queried the demon
sarcastically. “You were never concerned with justice a day in your
life except when it was in your favor. Bye.” With a tap of his claw
to the rectangle the man disappeared briskly in mid-outrage,
leaving the room in cold silence.

The demon was back on his device, humming a
bit to himself. “That felt good. I hate those unthinking,
unreflexive types. That Hell ought to humble him a bit … eternal
Hell! What an imagination.”

Everyone just stared at him as he busily
tapped away.

“
Julia Hanson?” He said looking at the
same woman who had asked about the lake of fire outside the window.
“Single. Professor of Biology at University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Confirmed atheist. Wrote a number of papers on the
evolution of bumblebee society. Very interesting ones, too, I must
say. Well, well, well, you must really be surprised to be here? Eh?
Turns out there is a god after all. Now do you believe?”

The frightened woman could only shake her
head and mutter, “I’m sure I’ve gone mad,” but she did not seem
convinced by her own words. After a moment she asked, “So there is
a God?”

The demon nodded his head, “Yes of course.
The Wise Lord, Ahura Mazda. I’m his humble servant.”

“
I thought demons were under the control
of Satan? Sort of the dark side of the Force.”

“
Why don’t I ever get the people who have
studied a little Zoroastrianism here?” he said, shaking his head
sadly. “No, that’s Christian. Ahriman has rebelled against God, but
in charge of Hell? Heavens, no. How can you think God would let
something like Hell exist if He’s really in charge of the universe?
Sheesh. Running a Hell is an art of such imagination and
brilliance, how could anyone but the Wise God of Judgment be in
charge?”

The woman looked down at her smock and
mumbled, “I know more about bumble bees.”

“
Yes, you do,” the demon said excitedly,
tapping frantically as if he had just had a stroke of
brilliance.

“
There,” he said smiling. “Bye.”

She was gone.

A few more questions, a few more taps, some
of the others begging, some silent, but one by one the people
disappeared until one man remained sitting on his chair.

“
Well, well, last the best of all the
game, hey? … Soren Johansson, died of brain cancer … hmm, died
young, only forty-five. Four children. Well, I’m sure they’ll miss
you. Looks like you were a good husband, good father … not a bad
Mormon.” He smiled. “You would have made a good Zoroastrian. Now,
what Hell for you? Let’s see, you liked to read … in fact it seems
you loved books. Interesting.”

Suddenly the demon looked up.

“
Bye.”

And so it began.

~~~

I FOUND THIS book around the
23
^439th
day of my stay in Hell. How odd to find a book
that looks as if I wrote it, when it’s really just one of the
random possibilities that exist here. It was close enough to the
actual events that I will place it in the slot to see if it changes
my fate. The slight variations are trivial and of no consequence.
How does one begin to describe infinities of eons? How can such a
small word as “eon” describe a length of time that is more akin to
eternity than any measurable time span? There is no metaphor I can
use to give you a sense of the time that’s passed here. My earth
life was so long ago that by now trillions of universes like the
one in which I lived on earth have come and gone. Countless such
must have blown into existence in innumerable big bangs, each with
a billion generations of suns flaring into existence, then burning
out into a fine, dull brown dust. After this long I am not bitter –
I barely feel at all. Now I only search.

THE BEGINNING

U
PON LEAVING THE
DEMON, I was disoriented and could only tell I was in an immense,
spacious building. Strangely, to my surprise and despite my terror,
confusion, and fear, I felt better than I had for years. Before my
death I had suffered terribly, but I noticed quickly I was now in
perfect health. I stared at my hands. My wedding ring was gone. The
scars and age spots had disappeared, leaving only the scattered
freckles from my sunny youth. I touched my front teeth, surprised
that those lost so long ago in a head-on collision with a drunk
driver had been replaced and the once jagged row of my staggering
bottom teeth was straight. I suppose I was also surprised I had a
body at all. As a Mormon I believed I would eventually get a
perfect body after the resurrection, but immediately after death I
was supposed to go to a spirit world. It was clear this was not
what had happened.

Feeling lost and confused, I was overwhelmed
with a desire to pray, as I had so often during my mortal earth
life. While alive, I often knelt in prayer and asked for blessings
and sought direction from the Lord. As then, I dropped to my knees
and began to pray, but I was overwhelmed with doubt and fear. Could
I pray in Hell? Could I pray my way out of Hell? Who was I praying
to now? The God I believed in was a kind, wise Heavenly Father who
loved me and sent His son to redeem me. He had an eternal plan,
which would end in my deification if I lived according to the
commandments and obtained the proper ordinances here in this life.
I was supposed to go to a spirit world to share the gospel with
other dead spirits until the resurrection. I would then go to the
Celestial Kingdom and live with my wife forever – becoming a God
like my Heavenly Father and continuing His work of redeeming the
uncreated intelligences that filled the universe. This Hell did not
fit anywhere in my belief system.

I began to cry. I bawled like a baby – tears
falling onto the white smock. I prayed, but all the while I was
shrouded in blind confusion. I knew nothing about Zoroastrianism. I
missed my wife and children. I missed the familiar trappings of my
home, my work, and my routines. Questions plagued me. Was I
supposed to pray? The demon said God was called Ahura Mazda. Was he
kind and loving? What was his nature? Was it even a he, like the
God I’d worshiped all my life as a Mormon? Could it be a Goddess? I
had no way to know. How do you pray if you don’t know what God is
like? Maybe God was a demon – that would explain much of the misery
of earth life. Would prayer do any good? I could not tell.

Suddenly, no more than a few minutes after I
had arrived, or so it felt to me, the lights went out, and in the
dark I wept until I slept.

At six a.m. – and I knew it was six o’clock
because there was a large (almost two meters in diameter) round
clock near me on the wall, like a giant version of the kind that
hung above my elementary school teacher’s desk, and underneath it
was a digital readout that said, “Year 0000000, Day 2” – the lights
came on as quickly as they had gone out the night before. I
surveyed my surroundings carefully for the first time. I was in a
long corridor about twelve feet wide. Running along one side of the
hall was a thick metal pipe–like railing about four feet high,
intended, no doubt, to keep me from falling into a fearsome chasm.
The railing was painted a soft brownish red and fashioned with
rounded corners and turns like the low fences that front the wire
cages at the zoo. It extended down the endless hall until it
disappeared in a vanishing point, almost as if I were looking into
parallel facing mirrors that give the illusion they go on and on
forever. Looking across the railing to the other side of the chasm,
which seemed as bottomless as the corridor seemed long, I could see
I was on an upper floor of a vast building. The floors on the other
side of the chasm looked like a series of matching floors to the
one on which I stood. The floors across the hundred-foot span
extended upward and downward as far as the eye could see. On every
floor were rows upon rows of books. Millions of them (you will see
soon what a terrible underestimate this is). It struck me as
nothing so much as a prison block with books arranged on shelves on
each floor rather than jail cells.

The floor was carpeted with the drab, gray,
highly functional carpet that seems ubiquitous in public buildings.
People were scattered everywhere on both sides of the abyss, some
standing, staring blankly, others walking in a daze, some weeping
uncontrollably, some kneeling in desperate prayer as I had done
last night. Everyone looked as stunned and frightened as I felt. No
one looked interested in talking, and everyone seemed as
preoccupied as I was with trying to understand this strange
afterlife into which we had unexpectedly been tossed.

I turned back to investigate my surroundings.
In the vicinity of where I slept, I found a break in the shelves of
books. Looking over the rail to the other side, where I had a
panoramic view of this strange building, I could see that such
breaks in the rows of books occurred about every three hundred
yards or so on each floor. The breaks were identical: on each one
there was a round clock with large black hands and a digital date
readout in the center of the clock-face. In front of every clock in
the hallway was a small kiosk near the railing. Next to the clock
was a sign with a set of rules and advice. There was also an open
entrance into a small room. I peered into the closest and found it
led to a small chamber furnished with seven neatly made beds, the
frame being constructed of the same metal that fashioned the
railing. On each bed was a mattress, fitted sheets, pillow, a
blanket, and a smock identical to the one I was wearing. There was
also a drinking fountain near the entrance. Attached to the little
bedroom was a spacious bathroom with a shower, sink, and a generous
full-length mirror on the wall opposite the sink. There were no
necessities like toothbrushes or razors of any kind; however, there
was toilet paper, tissue, and soap in a pump bottle. 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.

I looked in the mirror and discovered not the
gaunt, forty-five-year-old dying-of-cancer me that stared back from
the glass the last time I looked at my reflection, but a fit
version of my twenty-five-year-old self. My body was sleek and well
muscled, with my hair neatly cut and parted down the middle as I’d
always worn it. My teeth were white and straighter than I’d
imagined was possible. For a brief second I had a light-hearted
feeling of satisfaction. I
had
been resurrected, as I’d
always believed in my religion. I flexed my muscles and stood
admiring my flawless grin, greatly pleased by how healthy I felt.
Thinking that my resurrected body would be indestructible, as my
Mormon beliefs held, I tried to scratch myself. I was disappointed
that without difficulty I drew blood. And it hurt. This was not the
type of afterlife I had always envisioned. Not by a long shot.