A Short Stay in Hell (10 page)

He nodded and without another word walked to
the nearest stairwell and started down.

He had told me there was a large group of
people about three weeks journey straight up. Entering the same
stairwell he had just started down, I started up.

I had lots of time to think as I climbed up
stairway after stairway, floor after floor. Mostly I thought about
Rachel. I worried that after all this time she might still be
falling. Or maybe she had escaped as I had, but how would I ever
find her if she did? If I started falling again, I could fly past
her at night and never find her again. Maybe I had already passed
her? For the first time since my arrival I thought again of
praying. I needed help far beyond what I could take control of, and
prayer seemed the only measure I could take. But who would I pray
to? This God of the Zoroastrians? A God who would send me to a
place like this? What help would he be (if a
he
he was)? I
didn’t know. I had no way to find out.

I had a vague hope that the people thousands
of miles below the groups I knew would be different from those I
already knew (especially the Direites). How delighted I would be to
meet someone from Africa or Asia. Someone with a different story to
tell. The never-ending sameness of all those I knew somehow blended
with the sameness of this Hell. The same rooms, the same railings,
the same kiosks, the same bedrooms with the same bathrooms, the
same signs, with the same rug, and the endless stacks of books all
bound with unerring sameness, seemed to match the sameness of the
people, all white, all American, all died between 1939 and 2043,
the same outlooks, the same haircuts, the same maddening habits.
Homogeneity everywhere, endlessly stretching into an eternity of
monotony.

I dared wonder if I might have come to a new
part of the library. Perhaps this was where the Chinese were kept!
Maybe I could meet an Arab from the fifteenth century! But I knew
deep down it was not to be. The books were full of Roman letters, I
reminded myself. But maybe I would find someone from Germany. But
then there were no umlauts. From England? Maybe. But somehow I
feared the defining point of this Hell was its unrelenting
uniformity, its lack of variation from type. 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.

I thought of the mountains and forests I
remembered from my life as I climbed. I thought of the intricate
structure of an ant’s cuticle. How delicate the song of a bird,
nestled in the twisted branches of a towering pine, sounds spilling
into the cool morning. I thought of the zippered feathers of a
sparrow and of its patterned colors, the banded mottling of its
breast, its tiny feet curled round the rough brown bark, cracked
and furrowed, giving purchase to those tiny clawed feet. What I
would have given even to see a cockroach in this place. It would be
heralded as a treasure that could not be purchased with a king’s
ransom. To see its six legs splaying from its thorax would have
been a sight worth waiting for in a line a thousand years long.
Songs would be written about its delicate multi-segmented antennae.
Its wings would have inspired such poetry as to make people weep
for decades at its telling.

But here, deep in Hell, there was nothing to
match such a wonder. Such splashes of variegation were denied us.
Our attempts at music were nothing but a shadow of what we enjoyed
on earth, but even more than music, we missed the natural sounds.
The woosh of wind through the yellowing leaves of an oak on a cool
day late in fall. The splashing of water over smooth stone in a
tiny creek as it made its way down a steep mountain. Even the
whistle of a train, or the screaming of a truck down the highway
would have seemed like a symphony.

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. The ring of my feet
striking the steps was becoming the summation of a sameness from
which there was no escape. Nevertheless, I climbed on. And on. And
on.

It took me four weeks, but at last I ran into
someone. I entered the floor exhausted, wobbled to the kiosk, and
asked for glass of Gatorade. The drink was ice cold, and I downed
it with relish. I noticed a man sitting in the middle of the stacks
just looking down into the endless emptiness of the gulf.

“Hello,” I said.

He looked up, and I was shocked by the hollow
sorrow on his face. His eyes were red and swollen, as if he had
been crying for days, but now there was a coldness – a lostness
more like – in his stricken, forsaken eyes that frightened me. He
said nothing, but after looking at me blankly, he turned away and
continued staring vacantly into the gulf.

I decided to leave him and retired to the
sleeping room, took a shower, and went to bed. The lights were not
due off for an hour or so, but climbing all day was exhausting
work.

~~~

IN THE MORNING the man was still there. I ate
a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and some toast, trying once again to engage
the man in conversation, but he remained silent. I started up
again. On about every fifth story up, I left the stairwell and
peeked into the stacks, hoping I would run into more people. About
ten that morning, I ran into a group of people. They were huddled
in a small gathering, crying and talking in low sorrowful tones as
if a great tragedy had occurred. As I approached I greeted them
cautiously. One girl burst into tears. Everyone was mourning like I
had never seen before in Hell.

In a place where there is no real death, I
had seen pain, anger, hatred, viciousness, blazing insane malicious
rage, boredom often, frustration commonly, love, joy, contentment,
excitement, sorrow over lost love, and a host of other emotions,
but not this. Not this kind of mourning. Such a striking
combination of loss and unalloyed despair I had not seen since my
life on earth.

“What’s wrong?” was all I could say.

One of the men turned to me, his features a
mask of grief.

“Then you haven’t heard?”

I gave a short version of my fall and landing
in this part of the library.

“You’ve come a long way,” was his only
comment.

I made some remark about my surprise that I
had not hit the bottom yet. One of the women and two of the men
burst into tears.

I looked at the man who was speaking and
asked as delicately as I could, “What happened?”

He stared at me as if I had just arrived off
a boat in a foreign land.

“Master Took finished his calculations.”
Again a round of tears broke out among the gathered group.

He turned to me and said, “Maybe you should
go see him yourself. I can’t talk about it anymore.” His voice
cracked as he spoke, but he managed to add, “He’s about seventeen
floors up. He’ll tell you what’s going on.”

There was a stony silence as I backed away
and started climbing again. It only took me a few minutes to dash
up the seventeen floors.

I walked into the hall and was stunned by the
sorrow. People were weeping. Some seemed almost catatonic, staring
into nothing, their faces a frozen rictus empty of expression. I
saw a man and asked where I could find Mr. Took. He waved me down
the hall. “Third flat down,” he said stiffly. I made my way through
the group of sorrowing souls.

Mr. Took was sitting on his bed, his head
clutched in his hands.

“Mr. Took?” I asked. He looked up. He didn’t
answer at first, so I asked again.

“What?” he said coldly.

I explained I was new to the floor and was
from about thirty thousand miles up.

He shook his head and asked sarcastically,
“So there are still only white, English-speaking Americans even up
that high? I should have known. What do you want?” He seemed
distant.

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!”

I was frightened for a minute that he was
going to get violent, and backed away, but he just sat down on the
bed and put his head in his hands.

I picked up the paper and stared blankly at
the calculations, but I could not make heads or tails of them.

“How long did you work on this?” I asked
after his breathing had returned to normal. He lifted his head and
looked at me.

“What?”

“You’ve been doing this a long time?”

“I had an estimate in just a few minutes, but
the exact answer has taken me awhile – I did not want to believe my
guess.”

“What are they, if you don’t mind me
asking?”

He let out a sigh. “I calculated the number
of books in the library.” He stopped and looked at the papers he
had thrown at me.

“How many are there?” I asked. “Is there a
finite number?” This was one of the most discussed questions in
Hell. Our university, despite some people trained in calculus, had
no one versed in probability theory. Had he really calculated the
number of books, which was generally believed to be finite, but
very large? I could feel my excitement growing. “How many?” I asked
with a little more tension in my voice, realizing the implications
of what I was asking.

“Ninety-five raised to the one million three
hundred twelve thousandth power.”

“That’s a lot. Right?”

“You don’t understand. In our old universe
there were only ten raised to the seventy-eighth electrons.”

“You mean there are more books in this
library than there were electrons in our whole previous
universe?”

“Way more.” Then he added with an evil,
mischievous look, “In fact, I’ve calculated the dimensions of the
library. You say you’re from thirty thousand miles up? Did you
wonder when you would hit the bottom?”

I nodded slowly.

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.”

THE DEEPEST ABYSS

I
WANDERED FOR MANY
YEARS after that. I was paralyzed. I knew finally that Rachel and I
would never meet again, but I hoped for a hundred years I would
happen upon her one day. I played it out over and over in my mind.
I would one day walk up to a kiosk and there she would be, ordering
the hummus falafel she was so fond of. She would see me and jump up
and throw her arms around me. I would never let go. Sometimes, in
my mind, I found her sitting on the floor of the library pulling
books off the shelves and looking at them. Other times I pictured
her falling past me, shouting out my name. I would leap over the
railing and, plunging like superman, catch her at last. We would
embrace and never let go. We would never let go until we hit the
bottom a zillion, zillion years later. But these were not to be.
I’ve never found her. I know she dwells somewhere in this vast
library; like the book of my life, she exists somewhere. Right now
she is somewhere, probably alone like me, and somewhere she is
undoubtedly pulling book after book off a shelf, scanning it, and
tossing it aside. She probably, like me, keeps a book or two at her
side. Perhaps one contains a novel she’s found, or a long and
intricate poem. Maybe she has found her story and has left this
Hell – no, like me through the eons, she has covered only a drop in
the ocean of books that await our perusal.

It seems odd to me now that after so long I
still focus on a time so brief as to be but a fraction of an
instant in the time I will be here, but so powerfully has that
instant rooted into me that I hold onto it with a hopeless
desperation. 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? So I pick up another book. Open it. See a page of
random characters. Toss it over the edge. Pick up another. Repeat.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat … on and on the dots signify. On and on I
go, light-year after light-year, eon after eon …

I wandered for hundreds of years. Climbing,
descending, climbing. I made some friends, took some lovers, fought
a few people, protected others. I am glad to say I never ran into
another group like the evil one that took Rachel from me. Yet I was
never the same. My loves did not run as deep and rarely lasted over
a year or two. So one morning I jumped. There was nothing more to
do but find the bottom and start the search for my story in
earnest. I would have to fall an eternity of light years. So I
ordered a lamb shank from the kiosk, fashioned a bone knife and
tied it on my arm with a strip of cloth torn from my robe, and
jumped.