John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

“Lover,” my overseer began quietly, though he was using one of his most offensive nicknames for me, “no one knows who this passerby was, as yet?”

“No one, Miplip.” I stood on a boulder nearby, disconsolately knocking off flinders with my fork into the damned below. That particular nickname, Lover, is so offensive to me because it is so duplicit. “But I have heard he had a guide, someone from among those already dead in his time. Yes, I think this is generally accepted as true now. He had a guide, from Limbo, just above us.”

“From Limbo.”

“A non Christian. Surely you know.”

I was pleased to be one up on him, and not a little surprised. But instead of sneering and challenging my news he continued to sit where he was, in silence. The brown stain faded and disappeared. When at last Miplip spoke, it was thoughtfully:

“We could make use of this man, Lover. The mere mention of him might make an excellent torture.”

I left off swinging at the chips of rock and turned to face him. “Look here, Miplip, it seems to me that ‘the mere mention’ of a human being who got away would be joyful news to these souls.”

To debate with him was pointless; innumerable experiences had taught me that I lacked even the shadow of a particle of a maggot of hope. He had won every argument since Lucifer’s Fall . And yet…once again I experienced the wretched excitement, the stirring of a spirit that will not be held still, the baffling resurgence of — what was it? It overwhelmed me, every time Miplip and I began to heave our opinions back and forth. Uselessly I struggled to keep quiet and let him say what he had to say. That scrambling monotony inside me took over. In the thrill of discovering that there were two points of view here , Miplip’s and my own, an eternity of lost arguments dropped out of my memory. In other words, I became an idiot.

“You say Miplip!” I shouted, banging the heel of my fork on the boulder. “You say he will cause pain?”

At that Miplip shook off his introspection. He laughed derisively, showing the yellow inside of his mouth. It was a nastier yellow than my own, and his tongue was much longer.

“Lover? ‘You say ?’ What do you say, Little Gash? You have an idea? You are thinking? I doubt it, Cunt. Listen to me.”

At least I am not alone in my miserable enthusiasm for arguing. Debate is the most avidly pursued activity in Hell. This is not an exaggeration. I have never seen two devils get together and not immediately take up some pro and con to occupy their leisure time. If a third demon joins them, he will find a middle ground suitable for contention. Miplip, too, took obvious pleasure in it — devastatingly obvious.

“Now Lover, see if you can follow what I am saying. I will use small words. I will pronounce them slowly. How…”

“Miplip, I have a mind as good as yours!”

I was an idiot.

“Blasphemer!” my overseer cried. “And the One in the ice below? Your vocabulary is equal to His?”

I kicked the rock beneath me. Miplip assumed a commiserating look.

“Dear boy, who was put in charge here?”

I looked down, and scratched and pawed for a moment or two, but finally I pointed at my overseer with the handle of my fork.

“Who, boy?”

I unwrapped one finger from around the handle and pointed it, too, at him. I had no one else to appeal to, no one else at all.

“Well all right, since we are not speaking. Now perhaps you could show me who — or Who — set me in charge.”

With my free hand I pointed downward, exaggeratedly and repeatedly. One should never be uncertain about Who is running the show.

“Lover, I hope I have made my point clear? Well yes? So then, small words: How…do…you…know…what…our…pri-son-ers…think? Can…you…hear…them?”

He then outlined for me the main points of his amazing suggestion.

The great problem in Hell is that since the Last Day we have been incapable of communicating with the souls under our jurisdiction. Before the trumpet blew, when they were all merely spirits like us, we could hear their screams, their lamentations, their boasts, their pleas, and their empty threats. When we wished to, we could speak with them. But the reunion with their bodies, though it went off without a hitch, spoiled all that.

As was the plan, at the Final Reckoning the numberless hosts of the damned were reinserted in the bodies they had worn on earth and then one by one hurled back down into his or her designated area of the Pit and locked away from the face of God forever. I watched from the far left-hand corner of the assembly; even at that distance it was an impressive spectacle. The excruciating mental torment of that fall! And the physical pain of the landing! And then to waken, not only still alive but never to die again, never even to sleep, on a desert beneath rains of fire…or in the putrid slime…or the burning ice….

A masterful plan. In all the debating I have heard, never once has anyone disputed the beautiful piece of work that was Judgment Day. But then I am consigned to one Division here; it would be incorrect of me to speak for all demons and all Hell.

Thus the infinite project began well, and it was a long time before our confidence eroded, even so little as to allow us to notice that we could no longer hear what our charges were saying. Did a demon think he recognized a certain body and try to torment it with questions rather than his fork? Did the problem suddenly dawn on that far-sighted devil — some smart bastard like Miplip — as he saw his scarred or mutilated or burning victim’s mouth open and close soundlessly? I myself can remember reflecting, very long ago, that something seemed to be missing. Yet I admit, I concede, that the situation remained mystifying to me until Miplip explained it. For once, he did not claim complete authorship: he acknowledged that the information came not straight from him but from the demons guarding the monstrous City of Dis, where the Heretics are kept. Miplip is allowed to descend that far; my own limit is higher.

Our first reaction was to go at our tasks with renewed energy. It is not necessary to hear screams in order to know a body is in pain. We put aside our quarreling and, for immeasurable ages, spoke only to suggest some new kind of mercilessness, or to point out those we had missed. But at length our confidence ebbed still lower. We were simply not getting the proper response. Miplip might change into a huge, furious wasp, stinging at will, but the reaction would be little more than a slight agitation. And was that a smile — a smile — I sometimes saw on the faces of those unlucky humans I now and again hoisted high into the air and then let fall, down to the rocky floor of Hell? A smile?

I never had a body and so have no way of knowing its capacities, but Miplip was one of the many who had worked temporary assignments on earth combatting the forces of righteousness and faith. He wondered (and, of course, bullied me into wondering as well) if there were not limits to physical suffering. He postulated “the development of an anticipatory psychological uplift,” and “deprivation of pleasurable stimuli,” by which devious phrases he meant, in so far as he let me penetrate his meaning, that whatever pain we inflicted was, with the passage of time, wearing off . In fact, Miplip feared that we might even be giving our prisoners some small measure of happiness.

There followed a concerted attempt to learn to read the lips of the damned. We received the orders from the City of Dis. For centuries Miplip and I howled and roared at the damned, the idea being that one of them might shout back at us in words we could understand. But our verbal abuse elicited no more than a perfunctory response; the attempt failed everywhere. The variety of human languages and the vastness of time since any devil had heard human speech proved obstacles too great to overcome.