I dreamed I went to hell.
I wasn’t sent to hell, or anything.
I just found the way in and was curious.
You entered hell through a stairwell in an auto body
shop. There was a red bulb in a wire
cage above the door to hell; you could see it glowing from the top of the
stairs. Someone told me, “see that, down
there? That’s the entrance to
hell.” And I was like, “no shit. Really?
Wow.” So I went to take a
gander. It would make an interesting
story, I thought.
Hell was basically an endless underground parking lot, only
without the cars. The ceilings were very
low, and the floors were raked at about a 15 degree angle, descending
infinitely into darkness. The concrete
floors were painted gray. There were
low-hanging fluorescent fixtures that buzzed and flickered. The light was not flattering.
It seemed that as you entered hell, you met up first with the
not-so-bad people. The people who were
there for reasons that would probably seem petty to you — and almost certainly
did to them — if you heard them. The
white liars. The masturbators. The benign gossips. They were scattered about, standing or
sitting around looking moony and shell-shocked.
The thing you noticed almost immediately about hell was how sparsely
populated it seemed to be, until you considered that the space itself was
infinite, but that the number of people who have ever lived in all the history
of the world is finite, and of course not all of them were down there, so. While you might imagine writhing masses of
tortured bodies in sweaty piles and ugly clumps, in fact what you saw was
mostly lonely little ragged individual figures standing 50 or 100 feet apart,
not talking or making eye contact. It
was embarrassing, finding yourself in hell.
One of the rules of hell was that there were these weapons,
like giant medieval broadswords, and the rule was that if you were bigger and
stronger than another person, you could take their sword away from them. So of course the biggest and strongest people
were also the best-defended, although against what I wasn’t really sure, since they
were already dead, and even if they hadn’t been, what they had to fear from the
smaller, weaker people was a mystery. On
the other hand, the smaller, weaker people lived in constant terror of the
bigger, stronger ones, who would come rampaging through and rape and pillage
and torture them pretty much for kicks, which kind of made you wonder what the
whole point of their being there was, since you would think that that would be
the latter sort of person’s idea of heaven, really.
Anyway, I came in through the stairwell and the first person I
saw was this frail little woman in old-fashioned-type clothes, dragging this
ginormous broadsword behind her. I
couldn't imagine how she’d gotten ahold of it, but I could even less imagine
what she’d ever actually do with it, since she couldn’t even lift it. So I said, Look, why not give me the
sword? I’m bigger than you, so I can
handle it better. And you can stay with
me, and I’ll keep an eye out for both of us.
She agreed, I guess maybe because she thought I would just take it from
her anyway, and the two of us started moving deeper into the center of hell,
which when you think about it seems kind of counterintuitive, but that’s what
we did. It was only a dream.
Time passed in that dream-like sort of way, where things
happen and you don’t really notice or remember them, but basically what
happened was that over time, this woman and I met other people, some armed and
some not, and as we went along, we asked them to join us. Safety in numbers, I said. And after a while we had a pretty good-sized
group, which was kind of a unique situation, since as I said, hell was mostly a
pretty solitary affair.
The worst thing about hell was the eternity of it. There really wasn’t anything to do, and it
was forever. At the back of my mind, I
sort of realized that since I had only snuck in on my own initiative, and not
been sent there formally, I could probably leave if I wanted to, but I wanted
to stick around because it seemed like what we were doing was an interesting
social experiment, and I was curious to see how it would all turn out. And I admit it was pretty flattering, or at
least self-aggrandizing, to be the leader of such a large group of people, even
if they were mostly petty thieves and the socially unpleasant.
Also, if I had gone back, I just would have had to go back to
work in the morning.
You never got hungry or thirsty in hell, which was good
because there was no food or water, but you did, as I said, get mighty
bored. The thing was, you could actually
sleep, but almost no one ever did because if you let your guard down for even a
minute, someone would come and set you on fire or slice one of your body parts
off, which even though you were dead was still very unpleasant because it was,
as I say, forever. Eternity with no ears
or feet or whatever. But we figured out
that if we sat in a big cluster, we could sleep in shifts. The people at the inside of the cluster would
sleep, while those at the outside would keep watch, weapons at the ready. Then we would trade off.
People didn’t like the idea at first. They said that if you slept, then you would
dream, and how horrible would it be to have a lovely dream and then wake up,
only to find that it had just been a dream and that reality was the awfulness
of eternal bleakness and boredom? And I
said, if you hadn’t already spent a third of your life on earth practicing for
that, I wasn’t sure what kind of a reality you’d been experiencing, but it
certainly wasn’t one I could relate to. And
that got a dry chuckle. It worked out
pretty well, really.
Mostly we talked. We
talked to each other. We spent a lot of
time just sharing stories of our lives and the things we’d done and the things
we regretted not doing, but that it had made us happy even to think about while
we were on earth. Strangely, it still
made us happy to think about them, even though we were in hell now and those
things were really, truly, definitively never going to happen. We were never going to parasail in Costa
Rica. We were never going to form a rock
band. We were never going to have a
little house overlooking the ocean, or marry the person we loved, or breed show
horses. It was still nice to think
about. Really, surprisingly not
depressing at all, but actually kind of the opposite because now, with
literally no boundaries on what we could imagine, the parasailing became actual
flight, and the house overlooking the ocean became a house under the ocean,
where we could look through the windows and watch seahorses swimming by.
Our community got a lot of attention. Mostly from people who wanted to join, and we
were pretty open to that. We had
rules. You couldn’t hurt anyone. You had to be civil. You had to take your turn guarding the
sleepers and you had to practice with the broadsword, just in case. People got it. They had screwed up pretty badly in life,
most of them, and it had landed them here.
They knew better than to screw up anymore. We were pretty much their last shot.
But then we became too well-known. It took a really long time. Like, centuries in real time, although it
didn’t seem that way to us. But
eventually, we were discovered by the People in Charge, who did not like our
arrangement one little bit. This was
supposed to be hell, they said. We
weren’t here to enjoy ourselves.
Then they found out that I wasn’t supposed to be there at
all. That caused some problems, because
they couldn't send me back. Too much
time had passed. But they couldn’t let
me stay, because hell had rules too, and besides I was causing too much
trouble.
They took me back to the main office, and sat me down and had
a talk with me. They said, look, this is
very embarrassing for us and we’ve never had a problem like this before, so
this is what we’re prepared to do. We'll
send you to heaven. No questions
asked. Just take your touchy-feely
kumbaya hippie bullshit and go. But I didn’t want to go. I didn’t even want to go home anymore, even
if I could have. I wanted to stay with
my friends. I wanted to stay with the
people in my community. I wanted to have
long dreams and wake up and tell stories and learn about the people around
me. There were always new ones. They usually had interesting things to say. We took care of each other, but I was afraid
that if I wasn’t there to remind them, they’d forget. I think maybe the reason I was able to
accomplish everything I had was because I wasn’t actually dead. My imagination, my memory — they made me
special there. What if I left and everything
just went back to normal? Which was of
course what was supposed to happen. That
was the whole point. That was why they
were sending me away — to restore order.
They said I’d better do it or else. I said, or else what? What are you gonna do to me? I’M ALREADY IN HELL!! And they didn’t have any answer to that.
Finally they said it wasn’t up to me anymore. They were sending me to heaven, like it or
not. They dragged me away, kicking and
screaming. I kept yelling to my
friends: Take care of each other! I’ll find a way back. Just keep taking care of each other! But I didn’t think they would.
I was crying as they dragged me away to heaven. And already plotting my escape back to hell.
