A Short Stay in Hell (7 page)

“Hi. Nice reading,” I said as she looked
up.

“Thanks,” she said, smiling slightly.
“Another year down and another significant find.”

I gave a soft laugh – more like an audible
smirk.

“Always the unbeliever, eh?” she said.

“It’s just been so long – over two of my
lifetimes on earth,” I replied, feeling sorry for myself. “And I’ve
found one coherent phrase in that time, ‘lightbulb ocean left,’ of
all things …”

She smiled. “Ah, yes, the MST of ’25.”

“Exactly,” I continued, “and I’ve not found a
thing since – that was a nice sentence today, by the way, but
Stew’s a digger, he spends most of the day with his face in the
books scanning. I can’t scan more than an hour or so before I just
can’t stand it anymore.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

We stood in silence for a moment, and I asked
if I could see the text. It had been in Stew’s possession for most
of the time and he had just given it up a week ago.

She nodded and handed me the book. I opened
to the page and stared at the text. A thrill ran down me as I saw
those words embedded in a sea of gibberish. Real words, with
meaning, as if they had been in a sentence from a real book printed
long ago on earth. I looked at it a long while, enjoying the feel
of the book’s weight and the deep satisfaction of finding an island
of sensible text in an ocean of meaninglessness.

“It does bring a modicum of hope.”

“Yes, it does … and maybe some despair.”

I looked at Rachel. Since we were all white,
little differences were magnified, and her freckles made her seem
different and mysterious in a way that almost intimidated me. I
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.

She continued, “And I’m so sick of this. I’m
sick of the monotony. I’m sick of this university. I’m sick of
listening to people’s life stories. I’m sick of listening to people
repeating books they read when they were alive.” Her eyes were
starting to water. “And do you know what I hate most of all?”

“What?” I said as sympathetically as I could,
but I could guess what was coming.

“I’m sick of having nothing to look forward
to. I’m sick of not having any dreams. I’ve spent a hundred years –
four times my earthly life – looking for a book that exists
somewhere in an infinity of gibberish. I can’t do it anymore. I’m
sick of it.” She suddenly kicked the kiosk as hard as she could,
and then she melted down beside it, crying.

I just stood there for a moment. Such
breakdowns were common. We were all sick of it. If I let it get to
me, let it get away from me at all, I could be in the same state in
a matter of minutes. I knelt beside her and lifted her up. I found
tears running down my face. It surprised me. Something about the
day – reading the damn text, and making such a big deal about
something so stupid, had raised my feelings to the surface too.

She looked at me, noticed I was crying too,
and smiled. “Bad day.”

“Bad day,” I agreed. I helped her to her
feet, and she took a step and winced in pain.

“I think I broke my toe,” she laughed
wryly.

“Probably,” I said. “You kicked that thing
pretty hard. It will be healed in the morning.”

“Yeah. Of course.”

She looked around. There was still a good
crowd of people around. Sandra was looking my direction. Wondering,
I could tell, whether I was going to join her for dinner or keep
talking to Rachel all evening. Sandra and I had been bunking
together for about three years. I liked Sandra, we had a great deal
in common, and I was going to miss her. It seemed funny at the time
that I would think that right then, but I knew it was true. I could
tell something big was about to happen. I’m not sure how I knew,
but I did.

Rachel glanced at the direction I was looking
and said, “You’d better go. Sandra’s got a jealous streak I can
feel from here. I’ll be all right. Go on. I’m fine.”

I ignored her. “You were on the exploration
of ’58, weren’t you?”

“I was.”

“Tell me about it,” I said, with Sandra still
glaring at me from the distance. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard
your version.”

She gave me a grateful look and began, “Well,
as you know there were eight of us. Dr. Cummings spearheaded the
whole thing. He put together the four teams of eight who were to
travel up, down, left, and right until we came to the end of the
hall, or to the bottom floor or the top floor, but the idea was
none of us would return until we found an end, even if it took
twenty years … Are you sure you want to hear this? It’s not a very
interesting story.”

I nodded vigorously.

“Well, I was on the team with Cassandra
…”

“The anthropologist, right?”

“No, she’s the Marxist economist.”

“Right. Go on.”

“And Jed, Conrad, Katrina, Daphne – the tall
Daphne with blond hair – Mike, Rudy, and Doc.”

I nodded at the familiar names.

“We went left. Every day we would walk until
noon, eat something, and walk on until it was time to spend the
night. After about a month, we started running into people who
hadn’t heard of our university. But they were always eager for news
from far away. Never any diversity, of course. No old people. No
children. No blacks. No Asians. No Hispanics. Just bland,
ever-present whites. Things seemed civil everywhere we went –
unlike the barbaric behavior and rape gangs across the divide.
Strangely, after about six months the people started getting
scarce. And a week after that they disappeared completely. We were
alone. The books continued. The sleeping rooms continued on the
same interval we had always seen them, but no people.

“At first it was pleasurable. We frolicked
like kids in some secret place, but after a month we began to feel
lonely. After a year, we really had nothing to say to each other,
and we were on each other’s nerves so badly we started sleeping in
separate rooms at night. But we had our charge, and on and on we
walked. We walked a year further and never said a word to each
other. The following year the girls banded together and talked from
time to time. The year after, a few romances and occasional
conversations continued. It was on the anniversary of our fifth
year that we suddenly just stopped. No one said anything. We just
stopped walking, looked at each other, and turned around and came
home. I can’t tell you what it was like to find people again. I
think the first man we ran into thought we were off our rocker, but
it had been over nine years since we had seen another face, and we
couldn’t leave him alone. I’m sure he felt like a celebrity with
all of us fawning over him. Nine years with only eight faces. It
was horrible.”

She fell into a thoughtful silence.

I said, “I’ve heard the same from the people
who went up and down. After a while people disappeared, but the
books went on and on … Weren’t the up group gone for twenty-five
years?”

“Twenty-three, but who’s counting?”

“And one never came back? Julia Hatch, wasn’t
it? I knew her a little.”

“I think so. They said when they finally
turned around she just said, ‘Not me,’ and kept on climbing. I
wonder if she’s still climbing.”

I noticed Sandra was really scowling at me
now. I knew in a moment she would storm off. But I just wanted to
talk to Rachel.

She noticed Sandra too.

“You’d better go. She’s not very happy.”

I shook my head and lowered my voice. “Do you
think this is really a Zoroastrian Hell?”

“Ah. Our resident non-believer. How can you
doubt it? We were all told the same story by a great demon. There’s
a sign posted every fifty yards that tells us it is. And I don’t
see any way around the reality of being here. We all wake up to the
same set of rules, the same consistency. Why do you doubt?”

“I don’t really doubt – I just want to. I
think in part it’s the lack of diversity, the lack of nuance, like
the veins of a leaf, or the grains in a piece of feldspar, the lack
of variety and detail. I keep wondering about the idealist’s
perspective that our minds are sitting in a jar somewhere and all
this is just a projection of some sort. That kind of input would be
easier to maintain if you didn’t have to worry about detailing a
dragonfly’s wing.”

“Do you believe that’s the case? That only
you are real?” Rachel asked slyly.

I sighed, “No. Not really. I can’t take
solipsism seriously.” I smiled at her and added, “At least I know
you’re real.”

She gave me a big smile, amused at my maudlin
pronouncement, but glanced quickly over to where Sandra had been
standing.

Sandra was gone. I was glad. It seemed funny
that one day I would go to bed in her arms and the next not feel
anything, like a switch had gone off. But no, that wasn’t honest
either. This had been building for a long time. Our silences were
getting longer. Our arguments more frequent. 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.

“People keep telling me God is good,” I said,
“that we need to pray every day for His kind mercy. But why pray?
Everything is given to us. For protection? Why? Even if we die, we
just wake up the next morning as if nothing had ever happened. Will
praying hasten the search? I’ve seen no evidence of that. Why thank
this God who has condemned us to an endless Hell? We are all slowly
going crazy. And the task? We all know it’s impossible. 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.

“So I don’t want to believe,” I went on.
“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 expressed.” I sat down,
frustrated and depressed. “So … I guess I don’t have much hope that
things are going to get better.”

She knelt down beside me and took my hands in
hers. She didn’t say anything; there was really nothing to say, I
suppose. Tomorrow would come, we would discuss something, eat from
the kiosk, and go to sleep.

She looked at me thoughtfully, smiling sadly
to herself. “I remember when I first got here, I was a vegetarian
deeply committed to eating low on the food chain. When I was alive,
I didn’t want to be part of the industrial food complex with its
abject animal cruelty. Then one day someone watching me eat said,
‘What, do you think there’s some Hell somewhere in the larger
universe where people are running a chicken factory? Another where
they make these meals for the kiosk and send them here on some sort
of conveyer belt?’ 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. 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.”

She said this coldly, without complaint,
staring at her hands, then added, “Well, at least I can enjoy a
steak. I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with a cow. How could
it?”

I nodded and reached out and took her hand.
It was slightly cool, but its physicality was real and soft. I
gently rubbed her fingers and massaged her palm with my thumb. I
felt her relax and sigh. No cows, no chickens, no pigs were
connected with our food, of that I was sure, too. There was no life
here. Hell was a machine. Except us. Here, her hand in mine was the
one reality that severed us from the cold click-clack of Hell. I
rubbed her hand and she sighed; wasn’t that meaning? Wasn’t that
something we could cling to? I could
be
with this other. I
could form no other relation, but maybe her hand in mine was
enough, both sufficient and necessary. 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.

I noticed we were alone. Someone had just
said another sentence had been found about a hundred floors up, and
everyone had made a dash up to see it.