Mike Jones - Infernus

“See what I mean,” she spoke in a tired voice. “I’m not even sure where I’d put it. Maybe just throw it away, right?”

Then she left his office, and closed his door with a smart, metallic click. She barely stifled a laugh, but thought instead: He bought that, hook, line, and sinker. She walked to the elevator, and pushed the down button. Dark Brother hood, indeed. “More like Dark Mother hood,” she said aloud, but hadn’t meant to.

“I thought so,” he spoke softly behind. He pulled the lit cigar out of his mouth and blew smoke between them, obscuring them.

She turned, smiled, and entered the quickly closing elevator. They never saw each other again.

She went home and had a dream that night that she was floating beneath 17,000 layers of flame. The same dream she had had ever since she was a little girl.

A brief silence followed his last words. Then a male voice in the back of the room said, “What the hell was that ?”

Another voice said, “Hey!”

The teacher stood. She sighed, and the class could hear her breathing. “Do you plan to come back and finish this story?”

“Yes, I -”

“That story was boring !” an anonymous male voice shouted at the back of the class.

“Boring? What? Why?”

The young man stood up at the back of the class. “It’s just a conversation between two talking heads.”

The old man was clearly surprised. “But, I thought it was exciting because it is so necessary to what follows.”

“No,” he repeated. “I would suggest that you put this chapter at the end of the book, as an appendix, so anyone could read it, if they wished, when the whole thing was over. Just go right to chapter two, where I assume the meat of the book begins.”

“Hmmm,” ruminated the nude man. “That might not be such a bad idea after all. I’ll think about it, how about that?”

The young man sat back down without speaking again. The nude man smiled, and began deliberately, slowly putting back on his clothes. “You will ask me to stop reciting my book somewhere during the next few chapters. Nearly everyone does.” Bright sunshine was glaring through the windows in amber streams and bathing his naked, hairy body.

A woman in the room asked, “Why?”

“Because people tell me it is hideous, unrelenting and it gives them nightmares.”

Another voice: “Isn’t it just a story?”

“Yes,” he said, pulling his pants to his waist. “I made it up. Completely! We cannot proceed unless that is established first. It is complete and utter fiction.”

A large, beefy young man stood up. “Then why? Why would someone tell you to stop reading it?”

He calmly looked at the young man, sunlight glittering in his green eyes. “Because,” he began, then laughed, “maybe it is a novel in Hell.”

The young man smiled and shot back, “You mean a novel about Hell?”

“You tell me next week what you think,” the old man said, wearing his pants now.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” said another.

“I hope not.” He began pulling his T-shirt over his short-cropped, gray hair. “It is merely a novel and a short one at that. But, what if I could get inside your head? What then?”

“I hope you do,” said a young woman named Josie.

“With a blender?” he asked, then left.

“THE REALITY OF INFERNUS”

In 1991, I discovered that my first lover, Michael was HIV+. His previous lover found out that year that he was HIV+, so I insisted Michael be tested. I wanted to find out what my future was going to be like. It wasn’t until ’93 that he began contracting the first signs of AIDS.

That was bad enough, being confronted with the reality that someone you love very much is terminal. That you are actually going to lose them. And you feel so amazingly helpless because there isn’t one damned thing that you can do about it. The utter helplessness you feel is overwhelming.

I’ll never forget Michael leaning into me as we sat on the couch one evening and saying to me, “I don’t wanna die.” We both cried together, silently, for a little while.

At some point in ’93, I began thinking of writing some book as therapy. I had no idea what I would write. None whatsoever. I had a lot of pent-up anger (turning to helpless rage) that I didn’t know what to do with. Feelings that had nowhere to go.

For years I had been thinking of these themes that became the whole of Infernus. All the loops of chapters that turn, as circles, into themselves; all the elements of eternity that now exist in the book. But, never as one book; not as a whole. Just pieces, maybe short stories, but not altogether as one book.

One day, as Michael was just entering his sickness that would last, for him, a year and nine months, quite like magic, a bright silver sphere appeared in my mind. I could see roads and canals and valleys in it that represented chapters and themes, all circling around each other. That sphere was Infernus.

Instead of ripping off Dante’s Inferno , I thought I would do an homage to it. So, instead of naming the chapters “Cantos” or after the circles of Hell, I would manufacture everything (and I do mean everything!) as circles. Everything in the book circles around to itself eventually. Sometimes merely a few pages later you will see something loop around to itself. Other times it’s many chapters later. But, that was my homage.

I felt I could turn this sphere in my hand, and look at it this way, and then that. And see it all, all the time. All the layers; how every chapter related back to this chapter, or that chapter. All the relationships I never had to build because they were already established in my mind. The ending, the colors of the demons. All of it. I could see it all whenever I chose.

(It is obvious to anyone who has barely any interest in the classics that Dante’s Inferno must have been a huge influence on my childhood. And you would be right. But, of course, in my twisted mind, I never felt Dante went far enough. I also knew, that in his day, he couldn’t have gone farther. It never would have been published. Or he would have been executed, or the like.)

I’ve placed this paragraph in the middle of this dull, dull, dull afterword (that no one’s gonna read) to discourage the uninterested scanner. Here it is: The next thing I’m going to say is my theory… and it’s mine. If you ever meet me, please do not ask me why I wrote Infernus . I really don’t know. It appeared in my life rather rudely in ’93, and it’s been tormenting me ever since. And this is true whether the book sells a hundred copies, or twenty-million. Other than therapy for me, I have no idea at all why I wrote it. I’m just as much in the dark about it as you are. Heh-heh.

The first thing I knew was that it had to be handwritten. The visceral experience of actually touching the notebooks with pen was extremely important to me. I believed it was an essential part of my therapy.

Every time I put pen to paper, the book just flowed out of me, in the order you see it now. I could pick up exactly where I left off before. The book was written, in order, that way. All the layers were already there in my mind, just waiting for me to write them down that way.

I wrote when I had pain. Over the next three years (continuing two years after Michael had passed away) I wrote 86 pages, its original length. Over the next twelve years, through 2009, I added about sixty pages to it, refining and changing it here and there. (By the by, I do not recommend taking sixteen years to write a novella! No, indeed. Unless you go completely bonkers! Imagine Infernus in my head for 16 years total. Whew!)