A Short Stay in Hell (5 page)

“Now,” says Biscuit, “take the three and the
zero in thirty and add them together, and you get three, which
added to the last number in the first chain you found, which is
five, gives you eight. So the numbers of the page, line, and
character produce the numbers one, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight, nine, and ten.”

Biscuit was beside himself. His first few
days in Hell were ringing with meaning.

“What does that mean?” I asked innocently
enough, unsure of what finding the first ten cardinal numbers in
such a convoluted fashion meant.

Biscuit looked at me like a schoolmaster
looks at an errant rapscallion.

“Don’t you see? This gives us the number of
years we’ll search before finding what we seek. Sack signifies that
the thing that has the most meaning to us here, the book with our
life story, will be found in ten years. It gives the times and
seasons of our stay here. It might mean ten days or ten weeks, but
I suspect given the magnitude of our task ten years is not
unreasonable.”

“Oh,” I said.

Dolores was not too happy with his
interpretation. “Ten years? That’s a long time to stay in a
library. I hope it’s days or weeks. My heavens, ten years. Here.
We’ll all go batty.”

~~~

THAT NIGHT IN the absolute silence and
darkness I lay on my lonely bed thinking. Thinking about the length
of the library. I liked the idea of finding the end of a floor – if
just to confirm there was an end to these rows and rows of books.
Then we could look for the bottom, or the top, and start a
systematic search for our book. I made up my mind. After a week of
being in this place, I also wanted to see how many people were
here. I thought it strange we’d only found other white people, that
all of us spoke English, and that all of us made reference only to
things we all understood. As far as we had been able to gather from
the group around our area, we had all died within sixty years of
each other. I was curious if this held throughout the library.

I suppose what I really wondered was whether
my wife was hidden somewhere in the vast reaches of this building.
Maybe she had lived out her life and died and come to this same
strange place. Maybe I could find her.

At some point I must have fallen asleep,
because suddenly I found the lights coming back on, and the
brightness of morning revealing our world and pushing back the
abyss of darkness that made up our nights.

Our little gang of five typically gathered at
the kiosk in the morning, where the others would have a cup of
coffee. I took my first cup ever on this morning. Being a Mormon, I
had never even tasted coffee, let alone drunk a whole cupful. How
could that matter now? Zoroastrianism had been shown true, and I
was in a Hell that had no prohibitions against it. Still, it was
hard. Lifelong habits are not easily broken. Keeping the Word of
Wisdom, as we Mormons called our health code, had always been taken
as a sign of my righteousness, my worthiness to attend the holy
temple, and to participate fully in the church. Even here in Hell,
after a lifetime of keeping the Word of Wisdom, I was having an
ugly time deciding whether to try a cup.

“This is my first cup of coffee,” I announced
somewhat apprehensively to the usual gang. “Any suggestions?”

It started a small argument when Biscuit
suggested black so I could experience the taste in its full and
unadulterated purity. Larisa insisted I ease into it. “Don’t you
remember how nasty it was the first time you tasted it? Let’s not
scare him away for heaven’s sake.”

Larisa prevailed, and I ordered a mild mocha.
Everyone watched, holding their breaths as I brought the small
white cup to my lips and took a sip of the rich brown liquid. It
tasted like crap. The most bitter and disappointed taste I had ever
encountered. Everyone laughed and patted me on the back. They all
congratulated the Mormon boy for breaking with his past.

I finished the cup, but I felt like I had
betrayed something deep within me. Only a little over a week in
Hell and I had abandoned a lifelong belief. What if this was just
some sort of trial God had arranged to test my backbone? What if
this Hell was really all a ruse concocted by God to see what I was
made of? But no, there was something real and final about this
Hell. I can’t describe it, but there was a deep sense that this was
more real than anything I had experienced on earth. The difference
in the quality of consciousness between dreaming and being awake
was close to the difference between our old earth life and the one
there. This reality carried with it a profound sense of itself – a
deep sense that this Hell was indeed just what it seemed to be.
There was a truth in it that denied second-guessing. I really felt
and now believed Zoroastrianism was the one true religion and I was
truly and undeniably in Hell, and would be here until I found a way
out. Also – and this seemed odd to me – just as I believed in the
physical reality presented to me, I believed I would find the book
about my life I was expected to find and one day slip it into the
appointed slot and be free. I wondered why I believed it all. But I
clearly did.

Even when I tried to formulate doubts about
my experience, I found I was only playing with doubting. I really
believed I was where the demon said I was. I was in Hell and there
was no denying it. It was as if my entire consciousness, like a
computer program, now had a script imposed on it compelling me to
believe this experience was an actuality that brooked no argument.
It was as if my neural wiring had been rewritten in accordance with
a modified version of Descartes’s famous dictum, “I think therefore
I am.” Now it was “I think I am in Hell, therefore I am.”

Despite this perception of reality, I felt
strangely myself as well. I was still the Mormon, still the
geologist, still as curious; I still loved my wife and missed my
children terribly. I thought about them all the time and wondered
what they were doing right then. I wondered if “right then” even
made sense. Did time in Hell work the same as time on earth? Did my
week there take a week on earth? Did it take a thousand years? Or
twenty nanoseconds? Was there no frame of reference? Of course not,
I thought, there are people here who died over fifty years ago, and
I’d met a woman who died thirty years after me. Yet here the days
passed as I remembered them. Time on the large clock seemed to
sweep through a second the same way it did on clocks back on
earth.

While I was thinking about this, Biscuit
tried to get some cigarettes. They did not come. He then tried a
shot of whiskey, which, to his delight, appeared in a shot glass in
the kiosk. He tossed it down with a bright eye and asked for
another.

“It’s the real thing,” he declared as he
knocked back the second. He asked for a third and it came.
Strangely, after six or seven there still seemed to be no effect on
him. After twenty, he was getting frustrated.

“It’s all fake,” he declared. Suddenly his
eyes lost their focus, and he staggered against the rail.

“He’s plastered,” Dolores giggled.

“Um not plasssserd,” he slurred. “One more
for the rood,” he coaxed the kiosk, and it gave him one. “Hell,
gife mme a boodle.”

The kiosk gave him a bottle, and he opened it
and started chugging.

It wasn’t long before others joined in the
fun. Even people across the gulf saw what was going on over on our
side and started rounds of drinks.

This was too much for me. Drinking? I was
still reeling from ordering an “evil” cup of coffee. So as everyone
began drinking, I walked away. For the last week or so I had not
ventured much further than a couple hundred yards or so from the
bedroom near where I had appeared. But now I just wanted to get
away. People were carrying large steins of beer and telling me to
drink up. It was Hellfest. I could not. So I started to run down
the hall. Always a good runner when I was young, I found my new
youthful body was in wonderful shape. I would guess I was doing
about a six-and-a-half-minute mile and felt like I could do it
forever.

So I ran. I ran for a little over three
hours. (The strange thing in Hell is, you always know what time it
is. The great clocks are always visible.) Along the way, I met
others like myself, but, strangely, they were all white and all
spoke English with an American accent as they waved or gave a short
greeting. After a brief rest and a little orange juice I started
again. I was determined to answer the question of how large the
library was by finding the end of the floor I was on. It could not
be too far. Maybe a hundred miles or so. If I ran, say, eight miles
in an hour that would put me at about sixty-four miles a day.

So on I ran. I ran past people I did not
know, past the endless stacks of books, bedrooms, and kiosks. By
about six p.m. I was starting to tire and stopped to rest. The
people gathered around as I came to a sweaty stop near where they
were gathered talking quietly. I introduced myself and told them
what I was doing. They seemed excited about the project and told me
I could stay in their bedroom. I was a little disturbed that they
thought it was “theirs,” because I recognized that in searching for
our books we were going to have to move around. I slipped away to
take a quick shower and took one of the robes lying on one of the
beds. I paused for a moment, hoping I had not offended anyone by
co-opting their space.

I knew, however, that sometime during the
day, at some point when everyone had left the bedrooms, all the
beds would be made, bathrooms cleaned, and a clean robe laid on the
bed with a new pair of slippers. Any dirty towels on the floors
would be replaced and all would be tidied up. But being new to this
area of the library it was impossible for me to tell if any of the
beds had been claimed, so I just grabbed one.

I walked back out and held what I would learn
to call the usual conversation. Who I was. Where I had lived my
life. What wonderful things I had accomplished. The things that had
been left undone. Who I missed and what I should have done
differently and, finally, how I died.

At about 9:50 p.m., I went into the bedroom
and asked where I should sleep. In this room, it turned out only
two of the bunks were claimed. I was so tired from the run that I
curled up and went to sleep. As soon as the lights were on in the
morning, I was running again.

On and on, from one day to another, I ran. I
started counting my paces and timing myself, and just as I’d
guessed, I was doing a little under seven minutes a mile – not a
record pace, but fast enough. A week went by and there seemed to be
no end to this corridor. Sometimes I leaned far out over the rail
and looked to the vanishing point to see if I could get a hint of
the end of the corridor. Sometimes I thought I could see it, but it
never appeared, and really I could not see anything but a vanishing
point far in the distance. Straight on the shelves ran until they
disappeared into a tiny point that never changed, never gave a hint
that I was approaching an end. For three weeks I ran, covering I
estimate about fourteen hundred miles, and nothing ever
changed.

I began to think how strange it seemed that I
never met a single person of color. Not an Asian, not a black
person, not a Hispanic, not anything but a sea of white American
Caucasians. Was there no diversity in Hell? What did this endless
repetition of sameness and of uniformity in people and surroundings
mean?

In the third week I quit. I felt like this
was purposeless. There seemed to be no end. What if there wasn’t an
end? What if Dolores was right? What if there was an infinite
number of books, what if there really was no end? Suddenly, I
missed my new friends. I had only known them a little over a week,
but I’d formed a bond with them and, out here, I had not met anyone
else I’d become so attached to. I wanted to see them and talk to
them. I wanted to hear Biscuit talk about his sack. I wanted to
listen to Larisa laugh.

I ran back. It took me almost as long, but I
ran with a new intensity. I wanted to find my friends again. I
hardly said anything to anyone on the way back. All I could think
about was finding a face I knew.

And suddenly there they were. And sober, too.
(I’d entertained a fear they would still be sloshing drunk.) What a
reunion. They had wondered desperately what had happened to me. No
one could much remember the day through the fog of the alcohol.
When I left, some wondered if I had gotten drunk and thrown myself
over the side.

Now that I was back, no one appeared to be
much interested in binge drinking. Addictions are not possible in
Hell. No one here seemed to have any more than a mild psychological
attraction to things. My little gang had decided to drink only once
a week and keep it moderate. I was glad to hear it.

I also learned something interesting.
Apparently a man named Jed had drunk three quarts of vodka and
died.

“He was dead as a doornail,” a girl named
Brenda, who had joined the group, said. “I didn’t drink that much,
and when I found him he wasn’t breathing. He was completely dead.”
She had gotten some help and moved him out of the way. They thought
about tossing his body over the side, but decided they had better
consult with the others. The next day there he was. Eating pancakes
like nothing had happened.

“That was the weird thing,” Biscuit said.
“When we woke up in the morning, we all felt great. No hangover,
nothing. It was like the day was just as new as our first day here.
It’s strange here. I wouldn’t mind a smoke or another drink, but I
don’t need a smoke or a drink like I did on earth. All those
cravings are controllable.”

I was a bit of a celebrity. I had traveled
thousands of miles, and everyone wanted to hear my story. The
infuriating thing was, there was really nothing to tell. Yes, it’s
the same as it is here. The people are all white, speak English,
and seem to be pretty much the same as us. For a thousand miles, I
found everything along the way was the same as here. There were
people living as far down and as far up I as I could see, and it
never changed.