David Scott IB English IV

11 / 22 / 04 Period 3

A Brief Tour of Hell

“Ow…” I mumbled, sitting up and rubbing my forehead. “Lousy kid… Watch where y—” I paused when I realized that not only was the kid no longer in sight, but that I was no longer anywhere that looked at all familiar. I pulled myself to my feet and looked around at the massive blanket of white mist that surrounded me. “What the hell?” I asked, expecting no response. However, I soon received one: “Good guess.” I looked in the direction of the voice, but found it hard to locate where exactly it had come from in the mist. I looked around for a time, then finally caught a young man, about my age and dressed in a strange gray robe, approaching me. “Are you David Scott?” he asked, looking at something in his hands. As he drew closer I realized it was a clipboard. “Umm… Yeah, that’s me.”

“Good,” he replied, nodding and making a little mark on his clipboard before putting away his clipboard. “It’s time to go.” He then indicated with his hand that he wanted me to follow him and began to walk back into the mist. Understandably worried, but perhaps too curious for my own good, I dashed after him and, after catching up to him, I noticed that the mist appeared to be parting as we walked through it. “Umm…” I began, “No offense, but you really aren’t what I expected at all.”

“Oh?” he asked, turning to me, “Well, I’m sorry, but if you were hoping for Dante or Virgil, they’re in heaven now, so they can’t be bothered to do this job.” I raised an eyebrow at him, perplexed. “Err… Actually, I was expecting a skeletal-looking guy in a black robe with a scythe.”

“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Well, as it happens, I’m not here to tell you that you’ve died. I’m here to give you a glimpse of hell.”

“Oh,” I replied, feeling relieved, “That’s good. Getting hit by a rock thrown by the kid across the street would be a pretty pathetic way to go.”

“Eh. It would still have been better than my death.”

“Oh? How did you die?” He seemed a tad embarrassed at the question, but soon answered, “Well… A few years ago, some friends of mine had a bet that you could eat dry ice without dying and… … Well, long story short, I lost a little more than the bet.”

“Yee…” I replied, wincing at the thought. We trudged on in awkward silence until a thought struck me: “Hey… Why was I brought here to see Hell, anyway?”

“Oh. Well, truth be told, you were picked at random via lottery.”

“Umm… What? The forces of the afterlife decide who gets to see it beforehand purely by chance?”

“Pretty much, yeah. We usually only do it for people who are in real, real danger of some really horrible suffering, but the guy I was going to show around about now kicked the bucket earlier, so… You were our lucky winner. Anyway, we’re there.” I then noticed that the mists had now parted to expose what seemed to be a large, gray office building with big, drab letters above the sliding glass doors proclaiming: “The Bureaucracy of Purgatory.”

He walked inside and motioned for me to follow. I headed inside after him and saw a large number of ashen cubicles along the sides. As we walked past, I saw a number of people within, not really enjoying themselves, but not seeming to be pained, as they worked busily on the paperwork that lay before them. They glanced up at my anonymous guide and me occasionally, but returned to their work after taking a look. “Umm…” I began, “Uh…”

“It’s Roger,” he informed me, realizing I was trying to recall the name he hadn’t given me. “Ah. Roger, what’s going on in here?”

“We’re in Purgatory. The people around us are doing some administrative work to keep Hell running smoothly. It’s also so that they can get into heaven. By showing you what Hell is like, I’m getting the same kind of credit they are.”

“… Uh-huh…” I said, confused. We walked past a smallish glass-walled room with about 12 people sitting around a table, discussing something. I noticed a small sign upon the room that read, “Sentencing Room 1-B.” Along a wall of the room was pinned a note that announced, “When in doubt, be ironic.”

“What’s going on in there?” I asked. “That’s one of the rooms where they decide what punishments people should endure for their sins in hell,” Roger told me, “They carefully consider what the punishment should be for each person, so that the experience is tailor made to fit the sin. Unless it’s fairly run-of-the-mill; then they just slap on a standard punishment and move on. Usually, I’m working in one such room, but, since I’m your guide today, I get a much needed break from that. And now we get aboard the elevator.” After he mentioned it, I was surprised to see the large glass elevator before us; I had been preoccupied with noting the eerie similarity of Purgatory to a stereotypical office environment. He pushed a button on the panel next to the elevator before the doors opened. I stepped aboard and we began our descent, accompanied by a sample of annoying, but not exactly terrible, music that I was accustomed to hearing in elevators.

“I didn’t know there was a Purgatory, much less that it would be like that.”

“Most people don’t expect things to be that way. While we’re on our way down, I think I’ll just give you an overview of how the afterlife works. First, obviously, you die. Then, your soul gets taken to Hell—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa… What if you were a really, really good person, like Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Theresa?”

“Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s perfect, so everybody gets some form of punishment for whatever sins they committed. Those two spent practically no time in Hell at all and, since everyone refuses to tell me what exactly they did, I’m presuming they were punished for some things that were probably stupid, so everyone in Hell is pretty embarrassed about them. I’ve heard rumors that Mr. Gandhi broke his mom’s vase as a kid and Ms. Bojaxhiu was a tad whiny as a child. Like I said, I know it was some stupid reason.”

“Wait… They spent little time in hell? Isn’t hell kind of an eternal punishment kind of place?”

“Most people think that. But, really, what sense would it make? Heaven is populated by very good people who know how everything works in the afterlife, so how could they really enjoy themselves up there if they knew that people were being thrown into a pit of eternal suffering? Beyond that, why torture endlessly when you can redeem? Besides, it solves two other problems: 1) people would eventually get used to their punishments if they lasted eternally and 2) the vast, vast majority of people have committed more than one sin that’s about as bad as another, so this system doesn’t force us to choose just one.”

“Huh… This does make more sense than the traditional view… Anyway, I’m sorry for interrupting you. Keep going.”

“Alright. So, you get to Hell and… Well, think about it like this: Hell is a prison where you serve the bulk of your sentence for your sins. After that, you can get the equivalent of parole and do some work in Purgatory. After that, you can get to Heaven. At least, that’s the way it works with most people.”

“What do you mean by that? What happens to the other people?”

“Well, sometimes, those who sentence simply decide that a person’s been far too bad to be allowed into heaven. Take Queen Marie Antoinette’s case. Instead of going to Purgatory, she—” He was interrupted by the elevator’s ding, indicating that we had reached the end of our trip. “I’ll tell you the rest later.”

We stepped off of the elevator and entered a small, white hallway that seemed to extend off quite a ways, with countless doors to our sides, each with labels that read “Waiting Room,” followed by sometimes lengthy numbers. “People sit in these rooms and wait for their sentences to be decided.”

“Hmm… About how long do most people have to wait?”

“Not too long. Most are in and out within a few hours. The only people who stay significantly longer than that are those with really controversial sins or who are being punished by the waiting room.”

“Ah. … I’m… sorry, but punished by the waiting room?” He chuckled at my response and opened a door to reveal what looked like some combination of a doctor’s waiting room and a waiting room at a DMV, but the number of people waiting was far greater than I ever expected to see in such a place. I could clearly see a number of utterly uninteresting magazines from several decades ago upon the small tables in the room. “Sanchez, David,” an elderly woman called from a small window at the far side of the room, a cigarette in her left hand and a clipboard in her right. A man stood from his spot and approached the door to her left. Surprised and visibly annoyed, another man stood and started to protest, “Oh, come on! He just got here about four hours ago! Let me go in before him!” The woman at the counter sighed, rolled her eyes and said, “Dr. Thompson, simmer down, now, and wait to be called.”

“But I’ve been simmering and waiting for a solid week now!” Nonchalantly, she took a puff on her cigarette and blew the noxious breath directly in his direction, seemingly oblivious to the ‘No Smoking’ sign directly to her right. “Cry me a river, baby,” she told him. “See what I mean?” Roger asked me before he approached the woman. I followed and listened to his brief conversation with her. “David Scott has a visit scheduled at about this time, I believe.” She looked her clipboard over, shrugged and tapped her cigarette on the table. Roger then opened the door and we walked through, the calls of, “Oh, for the love of-- They just got here!” and “I said simmer down, now!” at our backs.

I then beheld an absurdly gigantic room, with countless giant cubes along the wall. Upon each cube was a door shaped imprint and a small panel next to that with a series of numbers and letters about that, but, other than those features, all of them were a uniform drab, tan color. We watched the man who had left the waiting room moments before we entered being led by a man in a gray robe that looked very much like Roger’s to one of these large cubes. The robed man opened the door and David Sanchez entered. “This just makes Hell seem more like a prison,” Roger said after this display had ended. “Almost everybody here has their own cell. Then we just give them whatever punishment they’ve received until they’ve served their sentence for that sin. Then, we move onto the next sin and continue until they’re able to reach Purgatory.”

“Huh… Pretty efficient place down here.”

“Yeah. Anyway, you’ve seen the waiting room, so you’ve seen a sin of inconvenience. Now, though, let’s go see the punishment for an acute form of procrastination.” He began to walk, pulling out his clipboard again and looking for something. Finally, he seemed pleased and led me to one of the large cubes. “What do you mean by an acute form of procrastination?” I asked him. Without answering, he pressed one of the small buttons next to the door and, quite suddenly, I could see what was happening within the cube. I was horrified to see a man, strapped to an operating table, his fingernails drawing blood from his own palms. His face was contorted and he screamed, “If you’re going to do it, cut it all off at once, damnit!” To his side, a faceless body was, with a rusty, jagged scalpel slowly making tiny cuts in the same part of his arm. It was currently cutting its way through the bone. “Good god!” I said, stunned. “He worked as a surgeon and didn’t feel like doing his job on a great many days. Unfortunately, his hospital was severely understaffed; few people were able to tend to those he didn’t see. Those patients suffered needlessly until he finally decided to get to them. A few of them even died. Furthermore, because the hospital was so short of employees, they couldn’t afford to let him go or to dock his pay. So now he suffers, pained by the scalpel left to rust in the corner instead of doing its intended task. When it finally works its way through his arm, this torment will end and he will face punishment for any other sins he has.” He pressed the button again and the gruesome sight vanished from before me and the horrible sounds he made were no longer audible.

I shuddered, failing to get the horrid sight of his contorted face out of my mind so easily. Roger placed his hand on my shoulder. “Remember: he’s one of the extreme cases. He’ll be a better person once it’s all over. He’ll get his good arm back, too.”

“… Right… I know… So, what are you going to show me now?”

“I think something a bit more common for procrastination would do nicely.” He consulted his clipboard and scanned the many pages. “Hmm… Let’s see… Is there… Ah! If we hurry, we can catch this one.” He then began running down one of the halls and I hurried after. “Umm… What do you—”

“We’re there,” he interrupted me, as we arrived at another cube. He pressed a button again and I beheld a man with a needle suspended in the air about half a centimeter before his eye. I raised an eyebrow at my guide, who shook his head. “No, that punishment is for doing this.” He then held his finger about an inch from my eye and said, in a fairly childish voice, “I’m not touching you… I’m not touching you…”

“Oh,” I said, understanding completely. Several moments later, the scene changed to a room clothed entirely in darkness, save a single spotlight-like ray of light centered upon the man. From the shadows, a gray-robed woman walked toward the man. “Congratulations, Mr. Paterson! You’ve served your time and punishments in hell and are free to go!” A look of great relief washed over the man’s face until the woman continued with, “That’s what I’d be saying to you now if I hadn’t accidentally missed the deadline for your paperwork. Sorry.” The man looked as though he had just been shot before he vanished from my sight. I noticed that Roger had pushed the button again. “So,” I began to ask him, “in between torments, procrastinators are told that they’d be out of it by now if it weren’t for still more procrastination?”

“Yep. Rather ingenious, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. I think I might get into some trouble from that when I come down here…”

“It’s a pretty common sin, nowadays. But, those who get this punishment, like yours truly, tend to be good people, on the whole. It’s just kind of a bad habit.”

“Right. So, where to next?

“Hmm… How about… Yeah. A look at one of the farms would do nicely.”

“Huh?”

“You’ll see… They house a plethora of sinners.” He then took off down a row, looking at his clipboard briefly. I followed him for what felt like several miles, passing an almost absurd number of cells and several other gray-robed people. “Jebus… We’ve been walking forever…” I complained. “Relax. We’re almost to the farms’ region.”

“So each group of sins in hell has its own region?”

“Well, officially, cells are doled out on a first-come, first-serve basis, but the keepers, those people in gray we see every now and then, tend to group people of similar sins or punishments for organizational purposes. And now we’ve reached the section we were looking for. This is one of the few rooms where we’re allowed to open the door.” He paused before one door and opened it. I wasn’t surprised to see a farm, but I was surprised that everything about the scene seemed to extend well beyond the dimensions of the cube that enclosed it. When I looked at Roger with my confused expression, he seemed to understand and told me, “Why so surprised? This is hell. We’re not exactly bound by the normal physical laws of the cosmos.” I saw the sense in this statement and looked back at the cell’s contents. The farm seemed to host barnyard animals almost exclusively, as I noticed very few crops and only a handful of farmhands. “Umm…” I began, “I have to say… This isn’t a particularly interesting punishment. The sinners work on a farm. Wow. What sin is this supposed to punish, anyway?” He chuckled. “The farmhands aren’t the sinners.”

“Well, then who are the sinners? The only thing I can see other than the farmhands are…” I paused as realization dawned. “… So…”

“Yep. The sinners assigned to such cells become barnyard animals. Not many cells have multiple people serving out their sentences together. But, like I said a little earlier, they’ve got a plethora of sinners in there.” I simply stared at the pigs, rolling in the muck, and at the workhorses and donkeys, not sure how I felt about the fact that they were actually people. “So… What sins are punished here?”

“Well, a lot of people, when sentencing, simply make broad animal-character assessments. For instance, greedy people frequently find themselves in that sty over there, cowards typically wind up in the chicken coop, and people who tend to make jackasses of themselves… Well… You get the picture. Things are sometimes a bit deeper than that, though. For instance, if someone treated his employees like slaves, while he himself never did any actual work, he may well find himself pulling a plow here.” A loud bray interrupted him and we looked to see one of the donkeys being struck quite brutally by a farmhand. “And, of course, those who mistreated their animals may find things a tad different when on the other side of the lash. We have other rooms like this for people who hunt solely for ‘sport.’ They get to find out what it’s like to be, for instance, the deer or fox they killed for no good reason in life.”

Roger closed the door. “So, is there anyone in particular you wanted to see?”

“Hmm… Well… How is Hitler punished down here?”

“I’m glad you asked. His is an interesting sentence. It may well be the worst that any have ever received in Hell. But he’s rather far away, so let’s get going.” After a few minutes of walking, I suddenly remembered something and asked, “What was it you were going to say back in the elevator about people who didn’t go to Purgatory?”

“Hmm? Oh, that. Well, if someone’s crimes are deemed too horrendous to be forgiven, then, instead of going to Purgatory, they memories are wiped clean and they’re reincarnated. They go back to Earth as better people, as their punishments in Hell have taught them lessons that transcend human memory. Few, if any, of the sins they committed before will ever be done again. But, that isn’t the only reason people are reincarnated.” This statement confused me. “What else could they do to warrant that?”

“Well, the devout often have it forced upon them. I mean, don’t get me wrong: the vast majority of truly devout people of any religion lead very good lives, receive light sentences and go to heaven with great speed. But… Well, some people, when put down here, refuse to accept their punishment for what it is. They rationalize to themselves that ‘God is testing them’ or that ‘Satan is tempting them’ or some such thing. We give them time to see if they will absorb the lessons they were intended to learn. If not, we simply reincarnate them. The only other group consists of people who’ve tired of Heaven.”

“Umm… I’m sorry, but ‘people who’ve tired of heaven?’ I don’t really see that happening, I’m afraid.”

“Think about it: Heaven is a place of eternal bliss and nothing but. Eventually, the constant feeling of omnipotence and endless perfection is going to bore people. Earth isn’t perfect, but it has conflict, which makes it harder for people to get bored. One’s actions there certainly mean a lot more than anything anybody could do in Heaven. When people realize this and want to go back, they get reincarnated without their memories. The cycle then continues.” I nodded, intrigued by this.

He then paused by a nearby cell. “You look exhausted. I’ll give you an idea of Hitler’s punishment for the moment, then we’ll continue.” He checked his clipboard, and then pressed the button next to the door, revealing the contents of the room. The setting appeared to be that of a bank, in which several people were fired upon by a man in a ski mask. The scene then played itself several more times, once, I noticed for each person who was killed. “What is this?” I asked Roger. “This,” he replied, “is an example of one of the most ingenious forms of punishment ever developed. Those who commit such atrocities as murder or rape are punished by living out the same experience from the other side. This man spent his life robbing banks and firing on innocent people when needed, so he now gets to feel the pain his victims felt.”

“… Hitler’s getting much the same thing, isn’t he?”

“Same principle, yes, but on a much, much grander scale. You’ll understand when we get there.” He pressed the button again and we walked along the hallway for several minutes more. Finally, we reached a cell and Roger pressed a button upon the panel. Though not completely shocked, I was caught a tad off guard when I beheld a gas chamber exactly like one of the ‘shower rooms’ I had seen in so many pictures of Nazi concentration camps, suddenly brought so vividly to life. The display seemed focused on one small boy, convulsing and vomiting, lying upon the floor as he slowly but agonizingly perished. “… Hitler’s living out the suffering he inflicted on every single Holocaust victim, isn’t he?”

“Yes, but it’s much more than what normal murderers and rapists feel. They only know the physical pain. When he enters a new body, Hitler knows and feels absolutely everything that the victim felt, including both physical and mental anguish. He has their memories; all the life and happy times that they had before coming to that wretched place. He knows that boy’s fear of what’s going to happen to him, as well as fear for his parents and family, separated from him so long ago. He knows that the boy knows the horrible ways in which many people in the camp have already died. And as the boy dies, he knows the worst feeling that any person can ever know: he clung to life for as long as he could, surviving entirely because of the hope that all would get better, that all things would return to the way they were, that the nightmare would end… And then finding out that he was wrong, and that all his hopes and prayers were for nothing. That is the pain that Hitler feels from each and every Holocaust victim.”

I said nothing. He pressed the button again and turned off the window into the cell. Then, I asked him, “After he’s experienced all of the pain of the Holocaust, will he be reincarnated?” Roger nodded and replied, “Yes. Those who sentenced him didn’t find any other sins to punish him for. It all paled in comparison to the horror of the camps.”

“So, if people who receive very traumatic punishments become better people after they’ve been reincarnated… Does this mean that, when he is reincarnated, Hitler is going to be…”

“A good person? Yes. I’ve toyed with the idea myself a number of times. It’s entirely possible that he’ll become the single greatest person who has ever lived. If that happens after the great many years he still has in his sentence, it will simply be a testament to the wonders Hell can achieve.” There was silence for a while, and then he said with a smile, “Well, I think it’s time for you to head back up. So long.”

“Goodbye, Roger. Thank you for showing me all of this.” Everything then faded to black before I awoke upon my front lawn with quite a headache.