Bedlam and Other Stories (6 page)

Why did you argue with me, perpetually shaking your brittle cheeks? They made a rustling sound, and anyway I conceded every point, sooner or later. Why the heartless flaunting of your superiority? I concede: you have all the advantages. Don't you think we have been at it together long enough for me to know? I concede that your tongue is longer than mine and that the inside of your mouth is a nastier yellow. I concede that your polymorphism dwarfs anything I am capable of. Then why should I be reminded, again and again? Mip
lip
. The nagging. The nicknames. The shapes you sometimes assumed, just to delude me. The jokes far over my head. The remarks to others. Everywhere devils work in twos, and one must be in charge. Therefore I needed you; I could never be in charge. But what did you need, to cause me such pain?

Yet Miplip and I, like all other devils, discussed this new development (or rather, this newly-remembered old development): a man who had slipped our grasp and returned to the world unharmed. On some occasions Miplip and I were lucky; our conversation would be more of a discussion and less of a harangue. On other occasions, unlucky, the reverse. But we did talk, like all the others, and we asked those demons who came by what they thought. The general response was confused, halting, even pessimistic. Some avoided the question altogether, darting away before we had finished so much as a single sentence about the escaped man. A troubling situation, especially in the light of all the other worries we had been suffering recently. Then came the day that one of our regular visitors, a sightless demon whom Miplip and I both regarded as a friend, rendered himself invisible in order to escape us. After that, Miplip made a suggestion—a suggestion, as it turned out, of monumental proportions.

He had his tail curled about him at the time, and he sat on the air, maintaining levitation by a gentle flapping of his wings. He seemed unusually subdued. The blind devil's exertions in bursting out of sight had left a brown stain on the air, just over Miplip's head.

“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.

And now came this awful news about the human passerby. As if we needed anything more to make us feel impotent, outsmarted, and ridiculous! The existence of such a person certified our deficiency.

Thus it was a low and worrying moment in our history, when Miplip made his suggestion. Smart, Miplip, very smart. But doubtless, as had been the case previously, bright fiends all over Hell had already hit upon the same idea, before you.

As always, he drew out his points to cruel, tantalizing lengths. I was asked a thousand leading questions, and gave a million wrong answers. Hell's principal and outstanding quality, my overseer asked, was what? Its utter absence of earthly pleasures? Correct. This absence was the reason it has come to be in the first place. But now…

“
But
,” Miplip thundered at me, “does memory have its limits?”

“I—”

“
Does it
?”

“Memory—”

“Imbecile. Respond!”

“Yes it does. Yes. I can't remember when we first met.”

“Correct. Neither can I, neither can I, though my memory's a damn sight better than yours.” He flashed his tongue, showed the yellow inside of his mouth. “So then Lover, pay attention puh-leeze: if pleasure is nowhere to be found, one can become accustomed to pain? Respond!”

If pleasure was nowhere to be found, one could become accustomed to pain. All Hell had become routine, to our charges. The abyss was their home. They had forgotten the world.

I found it unbelievable that we had gone so long without realizing this simple fact. My overseer's lecture had hurt, but I felt more astonishment—bewilderment—than anger or pain. For some unremembered time I stood on my boulder thunderstruck. At length I discovered myself, gazing down at my fork. I was holding the tool, my tool, in both my hands, and I had been looking at it so hard it felt as if the weight of my eyes had increased. The fork had been given to me at the dawn of creation, shaped in one piece out of an inexistent alloy: a weapon, an
instrument of torture
.

I began gasping, speaking: “Miplip…how could we not have considered…Miplip, our job, our job…myself, I, this is all I've ever…”

Who else was there to appeal to? I looked up at my overseer.

He had remained where he was, sitting on air, but he had unwound his tail. Now it flexed lazily beneath him. He looked at me in silence a while, then suddenly made a short speech.

“Don't blame yourself,” he said. “The whole structure is filled with silly types. Oh, yes it is, Lover. The entire place. We have silliness above us and silliness locked in the ice below.”

That was an odd speech, for him. The contemptuous debater's edge was gone from the words. Odd, too, was the philosophy espoused. But oddest of all…well, we hear devils all the time; we can talk to all the devils we want…well, lately I had been trying to recall the exact sound of a human voice. What was it like, once, so long ago? And in all my remembering, and as much as I had tried, sneaking off by myself, to capture that special timbre, I never came so close as Miplip did during his odd speech. This may be significant, in the light of later events.

My overseer was quick about returning to his old self: “So, Lover, what do we have to say now? Listen to me, Baggage! I would say we have time enough, wouldn't you? Tick-tock, tick-tock, savvy? Time enough to change our rather
high
-pitched tune, hah? Respond!”

“Yes Miplip.”

“Yes indeed; time to make them scream again. What our good people need, Lover,” he broadened his nostrils in anticipation, “is a reminder of what they've left behind!”

So began the next great cycle of torture.

Miplip put his protean abilities to fuller use than ever before. He was a thoughtful father with money in his hand; he was a dear, small pony; he was a kind white-haired matron wearing a gray sweater with maroon trim; he was a voluptuous girl dancing; he was a gleaming new building lit up for the holidays; he was a bush in bloom.

Myself, I am incapable of wizardry like that, but I did make use of a small talent for projecting visible images. It requires enormous concentration and a continual up-and-down pumping motion with my head and shoulders, very tiring. Prior to this time I had used the gift rarely, and then only as a vent for my more frightened or sadder moods, because I thought the monsters and bilious landscapes thus created would strike terror into my charges. I had done it, for example, when I was lonely. But now, with Miplip's guidance (for I repeat, I had never visited the world above), I painted the interiors of Hell with grain fields, with rows of fruit shined and on display, with city streets at evening swarming with living souls, with human youngsters in clusters playing games, with sailboats on blue waters, and a great deal else. I was ceaselessly reminded that my renderings were somewhat stylized, but Miplip frolicked about in them nonetheless, “bringing them to life,” as he put it. As if such sheer variety—I was astounded; what a
world
there had been!—needed anything more.