A Short Stay in Hell (4 page)

A man wandered over to us. “I see you’ve
discovered the quality of our library.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said, picking up
another volume and staring at the textual salad of symbols.

“My name is Bob, but my friends all called me
Biscuit.”

“How do you do … Biscuit?”

I continued to pull books off the shelf and
flip through them. I was having a hard time believing all of the
books were just collections of random characters.

The man calling himself Biscuit seemed mildly
amused. I was pulling them off the shelf, paging rapidly through
them and then, like Larisa, tossing them over the side. More people
joined us, and soon a fair number of us were looking through books
and tossing them over the side, most of them making the same sorts
of comments.

“I can’t believe it. Such nice books, and
every one of them filled with nonsense.”

“This isn’t right! Is it?”

“This is Hell. This really is Hell.”

One woman was laughing hysterically and just
tossing books over the side. She wasn’t even looking at them.

I have to admit I found a certain strange
pleasure in heaving books over the side. It was a feeling akin to
popping bubble-wrap. Taking a book of nonsense, tossing it over the
rail, and watching it until it disappeared flapping wildly into the
oblivion below gave me a strange satisfaction, a small sense of
purpose. Only Biscuit refrained from helping the general effort to
clean the shelves. He just sat there smiling, shaking his head.

“I see,” he said to no one in particular. “We
really are in the Library of Babel.”

A woman standing next to me, watching our
books fall like a pair of wounded ducks spiraling to the ground,
inquired politely, “The Library of Babel?”

“This is the Library of Babel,” he shouted.
“We’re in it. Not like Borges described it, but this is it, the
same idea.”

Several people turned their attention to
Biscuit, including me.

“What’s the library of Babel?” another man
asked, repeating the woman’s question.

“Don’t you see?” Biscuit was fairly animated,
and most of the people who had been launching books into the chasm
had turned to listen to him.

“It’s written on the sign with the rules
outside the rest areas. It says this Hell is based on a story by
Borges. I remember the story. Look, the books all end on page four
hundred ten, just like the books in his story. And look at this.
They’re all in blocks of” – here he started counting – “yes, forty
lines, and I’ll bet there are” – he started counting again – “yes.
Eighty characters per line, just as Borges described. Amazing.
We’re in the Library of Babel.”

Someone asked a third time, a little more
impatiently than the first two inquiries, “What’s the Library of
Babel?” Biscuit looked around him and saw that an audience of about
fifty people now gave him its undivided attention.

“Well,” he began in a lecturesome tone,
“imagine a library that contains not just every book that has been
written, but every book that could be written. I remember the story
exactly. How strange. But the basic idea from Borges’s story is
that the library contains every possible book. So somewhere in here
is a book of all
A’s
, a book of all periods, or a book of
semicolons, or
B’s
. Any letter. There’s a book that
alternates
A’s
and
B’s
for its entire length, but
most books are just a random collection of symbols.”

“So there’s a book that’s half
A’s
and
in the second half all
B’s
,” proposed one woman.

“Yes. But more than that, every book ever
written is there. And every book ever written is there
backwards.”

One man raised his hand like a student in a
classroom, and Biscuit acknowledged him.

“It can’t have every book,” the man said,
tilting his head and looking ridiculous as he affected a knowing
and wise demeanor. “Some books are longer than four hundred ten
pages. Take
War and Peace
, for example.”

He looked around, nodding his head trying to
find someone to acknowledge his point.

“No. Don’t you see?” Biscuit said. “
War
and Peace
would be in multiple volumes.”

“With blank pages after it ended, completing
the last volume,” added the woman standing next to me.

“Or with the life story of Leo Tolstoy at the
end,” added another woman.

“Both,” said Biscuit. “There’s even one with
the history of Leo Tolstoy’s nose hair completing the volume. But
most are going to be pure and utter nonsense – random characters,
with no order. Mostly nonsense.”

“So there’s a version of
War and Peace
with the main character named Fred instead of Pierre,” said a man
to no one in particular.

“And another where Mark Twain and Huck Finn
join the war against Napoleon,” added another woman.

“But mostly nonsense,” Biscuit added again
softly.

Everyone was silent a moment.

“That’s what the sign out front means,” the
speaker was my new friend Elliott. “We have to find our own life
story to get out of here.”

“In one or two volumes,” asked a man in
despair, “or ten or twelve?”

Biscuit continued almost to himself, “There’s
a second-by-second account of our lives, probably in multiple
volumes, a minute-by-minute account, an hour-by-hour, a day-by-day.
There’s one that covers the events of our lives as viewed by our
mothers, one by our fathers, one by our neighbors, one by our dogs.
There must be thousands of our biographies here. Which one do they
want, I wonder?”

Everyone seemed stunned, thinking about the
different volumes in the library.

“You mean there’s a biography of everything
and everyone in this library. There’s even a biography of the
guppies in my fish tank?”

“Yes. Anything that can be written is there.
The history of your big toe as viewed from the perspective of your
shoe is there. Anything you can imagine, anything you can picture
being written is here is this library.” Biscuit seemed to be
astonishing even himself.

“It must have billions and billions of
books,” one woman said. “If there’s a biography for anyone who’s
ever lived, and every guppy that ever lived, and every worm that
ever lived, there must be billions and billions of books.”

“Wouldn’t it be infinite?” said another man
shakily.

“I’m not sure. I don’t think so,” Biscuit
said slowly. “If we have four hundred and ten pages, forty lines of
eighty characters, and a finite number of characters, there’s a
finite number of books I would think. But it’s large. Very
large.”

We were all silent at the thought of the task
before us. In this library of mostly meaningless books there was a
book that described our life story. We had to find that one book.
It could take millions of years, I thought. (Millions of years.
Ha!)

Most of the people had lost interest in
opening the books and had begun conversations in small groups. I
fell in with Biscuit and a woman named Dolores. Biscuit had lived
most of his life as a homeless schizophrenic. He earned the name
Biscuit when he refused to give up two dinner rolls to a couple of
policeman arresting him. He told them, “These are the brain and
heart of the world. Were I to give them up, the world would die and
waste away.” He spent his life believing the world was dying,
because one of his cellmates had eaten them while he was
asleep.

Dolores had been a housewife married to a
factory worker in Detroit. She raised four children and then opened
a ceramics shop after they had grown and left home. Her life had
been rich and happy. She died at her daughter’s house surrounded by
those she loved.

In both stories of my companions, their young
looks contrasted with their sagacity and age. I had died young and
never really felt I had matured. I remember my own father, a real
man of the house, someone who knew what it was to be a man. He
radiated confidence. I never felt like that. I felt as if I were an
imposter all the time I was raising my kids. I felt lost and
helpless. I was flying by the seat of my pants, always with a
feeling I was not doing things right. Compared to my own father, I
seemed completely clueless. My dad was still living when I died. I
hope he ends up in a nice Hell.

A nice Hell. I laughed at the thought. This
wasn’t a bad place. It seemed like a tedious Hell, but there was
plenty to eat, good company, and it sounded like after a while we
would eventually get out.

We three went off to a nearby kiosk. I found
Elliott and Larisa there and introduced everyone.

“I guess we’ve got our work cut out for us,”
Elliott observed positively. “It’s too bad we’re starting the
search in the middle. Maybe we should find where the library ends.
You know, start at the beginning.”

“It’s not a bad idea,” Biscuit said, “at
least we wouldn’t accidently redo a floor or something.”

Larisa smiled. “I’m still not convinced
there’s not an infinity of books. How can there be a limit to the
number of books that can be written?”

Dolores and Elliott nodded in agreement.
(I’ll have to admit I was a little skeptical myself, but as you’ll
see, I eventually met someone who had calculated the number of
books in the library. There
is
a finite number.)

The clock was moving toward ten p.m., and I
thought the lights would probably go out soon. I went over and
ordered warm milk, and it appeared, piping hot, the way I like it.
I chose the same bedroom and the same bed I had slept in the night
before. My two friends did the same. No one else came in with us,
and we had the room to ourselves. What creatures of habit we are.
After only a few nights in Hell we had settled into a comfortable
routine. As I drank my milk, the lights went out and that utter
stillness returned. My thoughts were restless now, and I was in no
mood for sleep. How far was it to the end of the hallway in which
we lived? Was it further than a mile? What if it were a hundred
miles? How many books would that be? What if it were a thousand? It
wasn’t that far, surely.

THE FIRST WEEK IN
HELL

A
S ALWAYS, THE BOOKS
WE threw over the rail into the great chasm between the two great
bookcases were restored to their proper place on the shelves the
next morning. Every morning we leafed through more books in hopes
of finding our story and then, after noting the consistent sea of
random text, tirelessly heaved them over the side. It was getting
discouraging. I had not found even a single sentence that made
sense.

However, a few days later, Biscuit started
dancing and shouting with joy. He called us over and we all looked
in envy when he showed us he had found something that made sense.
It was the phrase “sack it.”

“What does it mean?” Sam asked. (Sam was a
short, quiet young man, who had formed a sort of clique with
Elliott, Larisa, Biscuit, Dolores, and me.)

Biscuit looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure.
Let’s see, a sack is something you use to carry something in. Maybe
it means I’m going to go somewhere soon and will need a sack.”

“What makes you think it means anything …” I
started to say, but I looked at Biscuit and he had begun to cry,
then sob. Tears slid down his cheeks, and he smiled at us, nodding
his head as if affirming something we could not understand. We all
were a little surprised. Dolores softly put her arm around him, and
he turned to hug her as he continued to weep.

“I’m sorry,” he said through his tears, “it’s
just that …” He broke off, then said, “When I was alive, I …”
Finally, after another bout of weeping, he steadied himself,
laughed at himself, and started again. “When I was alive on earth,
as you know, I was homeless and chronically mentally ill. I had an
old green army laundry bag that I carried everything in. It was a
sack that held everything I owned. A couple of times at night I’ve
woken up reaching for it like I used to. It was my most prized
possession. I carried that sack for twenty-three years, until one
day the bottom fell out. I couldn’t let it go even then. I
hitchhiked to the Vietnam memorial and placed it on the monument
right above a friend’s name.”

There was a moment of silence as we
considered this.

“You were in Nam?” Elliott asked. Biscuit
just nodded.

“I was in the South Pacific in WWII. If you
ask me that was more of a Hell than this giant bookshelf.”

Dolores began telling a rather silly story of
how a sack was significant in her life when she had carried one
from an exclusive department store with her to school and one of
the cool girls had been jealous and she and her friends had
laughingly ripped it to smithereens.

Within a few minutes we all found meaningful,
or terrible, stories about sacks in our lives. I even shared a
story about a sack I threw away at Christmastime with a fifty
dollar check in it.

Biscuit, though, took it as a sign that all
would be well. And Dolores as a sign of comfort and hope.

To be honest, I thought it was just a random
word, but I didn’t say anything to the others. They seemed
particularly moved by Biscuit’s story. He held on to the book all
that day and took it to bed with him that night. Sure enough,
because he’d held on to it, the book wasn’t returned to its place
on the shelf in the morning. It was still in his arms when he woke
up. All the rest of the week he carried it with him, much like the
sack he once loved so much. After two days, he found even more
meaning in the word. It turned out that “sack” was on page 345, on
line 21. Which if you reverse the 21 makes 1 2 3 4 5 backward –
sort of. The word “sack” was found starting on letter 27 of the
line and ending on letter 30. Which are both divisible by 3, which
if you multiply by the 2 and the 7 in 27 respectively, gives you 6
and 21. Now, since you still need to get a single digit, you divide
the 21 by 3, which gives you 7 back, so now not only do you have 1
2 3 4 5, you have 6 and 7. Now go back to the 27 and divide by 3,
so you get 9, and divide the 30 by 3, and you get what? 10. So then
you have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10.