A Short Stay in Hell (11 page)

For eons I fell. Every morning I awoke,
plunged the knife into my neck, and awoke the next morning only to
do the same again. Over and over, every day. Sometimes I would stay
awake for an hour or so, but then boredom would set in and I would
use the bone knife again.

Then came centuries of agonizing thought. I
knew I had not even fallen a light-year yet. I had googols and
googols of light-years to go. There is a despair that goes deeper
than existence; it runs to the marrow of consciousness, to the seat
of the soul. Could I keep living like this forever? How could I
continue existing in this Hell? And yet there was no choice.
Existence goes on and on here. Finite does not mean much if you
can’t tell any practical difference between it and infinite. Every
morning the despair gripped me, a cold despair that reached inside,
creating a catatonic numbness. There was a vague feeling of
falling, of getting hungry and having a thirst beyond reason, but
it seemed distant. Far away. And for the first time since my
arrival I lost awareness of the passing of days. Of how long I fell
I still have no memory. The unforgettableness of this Hell was
suspended and in this numbing madness I plummeted downward. How
many eons passed I cannot guess. But coming out of this numbness
was slow. I was more like a vegetable than a person – with my
consciousness only a shadow of self-awareness, only a dim sense of
qualia penetrated my mental haze. I ceased to think, to perceive. I
was no more aware of my existence than a snail or even an amoeba
might be.

Finally, slowly, I gained a measure of
lucidity and decided to end my fall. It took me thirty-two
attempts, but finally I woke up in the familiar halls of the
library. Instinctively, still hoping for some luck, I pulled one of
the books off the shelf – a splash of nonsense of course.

I turned my attention to the kiosk. I ordered
potatoes and ice cream. Fairly pedestrian fare, but I was
hungry.

I’m skipping details now – there is little
more of interest to tell, but for the next hundred and forty-four
years I wandered the stacks. I knew at some point I would begin the
fall again, but for a long time I just wanted to find something. I
did find this:

catch trees as windy dots

It was early in the morning when I saw
someone fall past me. I was lonely. So lonely. Of course, this far
down in the library I had met no one, so when I saw the body fall
past me, I leapt over the railing immediately.

She was not hard to catch. She was tumbling
dead, and I was rocketing down like a bullet – arms held close at
my side in a head-first dive. When, after the short chase, I had
her dead body in my arms, I wept like a baby. She was so beautiful!
Like an angel. All day I stroked her hair and hugged her and wept
with her dead in my arms. She was missing one arm and one leg. She
must have been trying to get back on the stacks. She had a bone
knife tied to her wrist. (Of course – how many design solutions
were there to escape time’s demands in this place?) I used it to
cut strips of cloth from my smock and bound her to me. I secured
her remaining leg to mine, then bound her torso to my waist. I
hoped this would keep us from twisting away from each other when
the hour before dawn stole our consciousness. I even prayed, I
think.

In the morning we awoke at the same time. She
stared at me for only a second before throwing her arms around me
and holding on tight. I held on and wept with her. She pulled her
head back and looked at me.

“Are you real?” she asked in wonder.

I could not answer. I just cried and held her
closer. She responded in kind.

She tried again. “I’d given up.”

I could only nod. Then I squeaked out a
feeble “me too.” There was no question what we meant.

Her name was Wand. Little else mattered. We
did not exchange stories. We just clung to each other as only the
lonely and lost damned can understand. We planned our entering the
stacks very carefully. We did not want to lose each other, so we
fell for several days, working out a plan to stay together. We
discovered that by holding hands like a couple of crabs locked in
combat, we could begin to rotate. By pulling and pushing we could
engineer a spin, turning like a maple seedpod. By escalating the
rotating rhythm, like when you try to rise higher and higher in a
child’s playground swing by pumping your legs, we were able to spin
faster and faster.

She had had a good deal of trouble entering
the stacks from a free fall – as she tended not to have the mass
needed to crash hard enough into the side and wrap an appendage
over the railing. She’d succeeded only twice in even coming close
to breaking her fall and she had last been killed when I found her
on her 783rd try. I thought of Rachel. How many times had she
tried?

The plan was to spin fast enough that when I
let go, she would have enough horizontal momentum to shoot over the
railing and into the stacks before she crashed. If she failed, I
would catch her and tie us together and we would try again the next
day. When she finally succeeded, I would try to crash as quickly as
possible and race up to meet her.

“It might take me a year to climb back up to
you,” I said.

“I’ll wait a hundred years if I have to,” she
said, smiling mischievously, and kissed me hard on the mouth.

We made love twice, before making our
attempt. We had both fallen so often and so long that we were like
creatures of the air, and it seemed as natural as in a bed. For a
day I glimpsed what heaven must be like.

We started spinning, ready to make our
attempt at the stacks. I’d never gone so fast in my life. The
library was spinning around me so quickly I thought I could not
hold on any longer, but we did and we continued to pump our arms
back and forth, generating more and more angular momentum. I’m not
sure whether I released her or she was torn from my grasp by the
centripetal force, but we flew apart. It worked too well. She flew
away from me like a bullet. I hit the railing with such force I
nearly lost consciousness, but luckily only broke my hip and back.
To my delight as I slid away from the railing into another free
fall I saw she had made it onto the stacks – first try! She was not
killed either and she managed a smile from the floor of the hall as
I slipped into unconsciousness.

I awoke the next morning and immediately
tried crashing into the side. It was foolish to hurry and not to
prepare better, and I only managed to lose an arm and
consciousness. The next day I thought through my plan more
carefully before executing it. I almost made it back into the
stacks on the first try, but lost a bit of balance on my approach,
and when I fell away could not hook my legs over the railing. I
wasn’t killed, so I tried again a little later in the afternoon,
but was in so much pain from the morning’s attempt, it was
hopeless. I was getting anxious by this point; I figured I was
falling about 2,880 miles a day, 62,000 flights of stairs, and
every day I wasted I was adding about three months of climbing. The
next day I was highly motivated and gave it all I had. I careened
feet-first into the stacks. My legs caught on the bar and tore from
their sockets, but it slowed me enough to be able to backflip so I
could hook my arms on the next floor’s railing and hold on. With a
Herculean effort of will, I pulled my remaining torso over the
rail.

“I’m coming, Wand,” I said, beaming brightly
as I died.

The next day I barreled up the stairs. I
flew. I bound up two steps at a time. I was relentless. After the
first month, even though I knew I had not climbed nearly high
enough, I shouted her name on every floor. My every thought was of
finding her, and I would run long after the lights went out, until
I passed out in that strange hour before dawn when sleep can’t be
helped and all things are repaired and made right and new in
Hell.

The days passed in a dream. I pictured our
reunion again and again, played it out in my mind over and over
until I’d almost worn a groove in my thoughts, so deep that it
seemed the only thing I could think of was our reunion.
Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation
is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s
loss, however, is the greatest despair.

I never found her. I don’t know what
happened. I searched everywhere she could have been. I called her
name relentlessly, but she was gone. I never found her. I continued
down after a score of millennia of wandering, opening an occasional
book, but mostly looking for her. Of Wand I found no trace. Now I
wonder if our meeting was real. Perhaps it was a dream? Maybe my
memory of her getting into the stacks was an illusion, and she
plunged light-years below me. She is gone. That at least is
clear.

All hope is gone also. All hope for anything
has vanished – meeting a person, finding a book, discovering some
hidden way out. So much time has passed, what is left to say? All
variety is lost, and billions of years spent searching through
books has left me a poor conversationalist. I could tell you of my
fall to the bottom – the starving and dying over and over in
endless cycles of pain and forgetfulness. I could tell you of
starting my search in earnest from the bottom floor. Of moving
slowly up light years and light years of stairs. Of opening books
beyond count. I could tell you of occasionally, every eon, meeting
a person, with whom I might stay for a billion years. But what of
it? After a billion years there is nothing left to say, and you
wander apart, uncaring in the end. The hope of a human relationship
no longer carries any depth or weight for me, and all meaning has
faded long ago into an endless grey nothingness. Now the search is
all that matters. I know there will come a time when I find my
book, but it is far in the future. And I know without doubt that it
will not be today. Yet a strange hope remains. A hope that somehow,
something, God, the demon, Ahura Mazda, someone, will see I’m
trying. I’m really trying, and that will be enough.

APPENDIX

T
HE LIBRARY OF BABEL
CONTAINS all the books of a certain size that can be written. I
assume all the characters on a standard keyboard and that each book
(as described in the original story by Jorge Luis Borges) is 410
pages long with 40 lines of 80 characters on each page. So the
total number of characters in the book is:

410 * 40 * 30 = 1,312,000

With about 95 possible characters on a
standard keyboard, that implies that the number of possible books
is 95
^1,312,000
, a rather large number when one considers
that there are only (according to Arthur Eddington [1882–1944])
1.5
⁸⁰
electrons in the universe. Now, assuming the books
are about 1.5 inches thick and take about 1.5 feet to shelve
vertically, figuring about 8 shelves 200 feet long and about 100
square feet of living space, the width and breath of the library
(given two shelves, one for each side of the library) is about
7.16
^1,297,369
light-years wide and deep.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

S
TEVEN L. PECK IS AN
evolutionary ecologist and professor of the philosophy and history
of science. He is the author of a previous novel,
The Scholar of
Moab
(Torrey House Press, 2011), and a forthcoming young adult
novel,
Spear from the Wealdend’s Tree
(Cedar Fort Press).
His poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous literary
journals, including
Dialogue, Bellowing Ark, Irreantum
, and
Red Rock Review
. In 2011 he was nominated for the Science
Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award, and his writing has
been recognized through honors and prizes including the Mayhew
Short Fiction Contest and the Eugene England Memorial Essay
Contest. His scientific work has appeared in
American
Naturalist, Newsweek, Evolution, Trends in Ecology and Evolution,
Biological Theory, Agriculture and Human Values,
and
Biology
& Philosophy
, and he co-edited a volume on environmental
stewardship.