Day 62.
I
’ve read that dreams can seem to cover a lengthy period of time, when in reality they last only something like minutes. Or is it seconds? Time distorted, compacted, compressed.
Last night, in a dream, my afterlife flashed before my eyes.
At first, I was a boy—alive—and I was in my grandmother’s garden. I was reliving the time I saw a praying mantis crawling on her lilac bush. I had forgotten about that time, until this dream. The mantis was green, not purple.
There was a rumbling growing in the distance, like a train coming. I ran around to the front of her house and stood on the bright green grass of her front lawn, shielding my eyes from the summer sun as a parade of motorcycles filed past, on their yearly pilgrimage to Pine Grove Cemetery…where my father is now buried. Where, I suppose, I must be buried.
Even in my dream I wondered if I had subconsciously stolen these things—the mantis, the parade of bikers—as material from which to build my experiences in Hell. Even while dreaming, I wondered if this were perhaps merely a dream within a dream…
When the last cyclist had passed, I tilted my head up to gaze into the sun. Its fiery radiance seemed to be spreading across the sky. The entire sky was becoming molten. The light became less whitely concentrated, more diffused and reddish. When I looked down again at the street, I saw that it had become cobblestoned. The pretty New England houses across South Street were now a solid wall of brick row houses. They looked so tangible, but I knew they were not. Every brick was made of the same ether as my body, compacted, compressed, just molded differently.
I watched as one of the many bricks in one of the many buildings of Oblivion began to wriggle its way out of its slot, mortar trickling down like dust. Then the brick worked itself free, and flew toward my now adult body. I did not try to dodge it. The brick struck my flesh with only the faintest breeze of an impact, and disappeared inside my chest.
Another brick dislodged itself. Another. From a second building, a third. They flew at me now from multiple directions, blurred streaks like arrows into St. Sebastian, and vanished into my body as I spread my arms like wings to accept them.
A man walking along the street suddenly turned to stare at this phenomenon. Startled, he began to run away. But as if his legs were under my command, they sent him veering toward me. He rushed headlong at me, and when he collided with me, it was like the barest mist breaking against me. He was gone. I spread my arms wider. My arms were longer. I was taller. The city was feeding me…
A woman came racing around the corner against her will, running into my open embrace. I consumed her. A window smashed, and an infant hurtled toward me. I accepted him into my bosom.
The parade of Angels came tearing up the street. One by one they launched themselves into me and now I was taller than the roof of the hotel I live in.
Multitudes now swarmed toward me, bodies tumbling over each other, crashing like waves against me. Demons. I looked for Chara but it was impossible to isolate a single face in the chaotic flood.
If we had the power to regenerate our bodies, didn’t we have the power to shape our own cells? Thus, all of the citizens of Oblivion, all of the inhabitants of Hell, were willing our cells to blend together. So shouldn’t we have had one anonymous communal mind? But I recognized this consciousness as my own mind, my own personality, my own distinct being. The others were lost, extinguished within it as they fed into me. Was I more powerful than they? No, I realized. Suddenly, I had an enlightenment. I had an epiphany…
This was why I had never met anyone I knew in Hell. Or anyone I knew of. No historical figures, no celebrities, no family. These millions, billions of people were not losing themselves in me. They were returning home.
I was steadily assimilating, gathering into me every man, woman and child—every Demon, Angel and praying mantis—in Hell. Each consumed, processed, made a part of me; each a single cell in my body which grew more and more huge, like an ocean built raindrop by raindrop, the rain coming in torrents like the rains at the beginning of the Earth. I swelled, I expanded, a giant looming higher than the six towers of the beacon-like Overseers, higher than the skyscrapers. I thrust my head through the ceiling of glowing lava. Beyond it was so glaringly bright that at first I thought it was still the white-hot lava. But no. It was light. Then I thought I am in Heaven. No. Not yet. Maybe not at all…
I continued to launch myself higher in my growth, as if I sucked matter in through the soles (souls) of my feet. But I realized now that my ectoplasmic body had lost its illusion of appearance, of physical substance. And as I lost substance, the void of light around me took on substance in a kind of trade off, as if it in turn was feeding off me.
Red stars appeared in this negative of deep space. Then I saw one of them closer up. A shining red planet, smooth as a river pebble. Another, in the distance beyond that…also a bright but dark red. Another, so close now I could see more of them reflected in its glossy surface (though I could not see my astral face reflected there). More and more planets, more than there are in the universe.
Soon they were all around me. But as I shot higher (and at last, I could no longer feel a solid surface below my feet—I had either flown upwards or it had dissolved beneath me), the planets appeared to recede a bit below me. They were so many, they took on the appearance of clusters, galaxies. Mixed in were some planets of other colors. Whitish. Grayish. These planets might have been asteroids, as they had less regular shape than the smooth red bodies. Heavenly bodies…
The surrounding light was losing its blinding glare. I could see something now beyond the red constellations, a blur taking on darkness and color. A body taking on form, even as I had lost mine, translated into sheer force, pure essence. I knew Whose body it was. I was not afraid to say His name anymore. I had grown too powerful to fear retaliation, punishment. Solidifying behind the hanging stars was the figure of the Creator.
I was in the presence of God.
It was not so much that He was behind the red stars, but below them; I seemed to be lifting above His still obscure head. The crimson galaxies themselves obscured Him like a veil. Titanic as I had grown, He was vaster yet. And yet…was it mere self-deception that I sensed in myself the greater power? His waning, as mine gathered? He trapped in that mountainous form which came gradually into focus, as I was liberated into unadulterated spirit?
The red planets were so distant under me that they looked more like mists than galaxies. Mists suspended in one incredibly drawn-out moment in time. Time standing still.
Standing still like a photograph of a volcano erupting, spraying droplets of red fire in all directions. God’s head was frozen in time like that. And it had erupted like a volcano. God’s head had opened like a flower, pollen billowing up from it. His halo was a cloud of blood, an aurora borealis of blood suspended in the air and in time but I was not suspended, I was moving, still rising, rising above it all…I was going to leave it all behind me, below me, it would grow so small and distant that it would be lost to me. Then there wouldn’t even be this surrounding light. (A shotgun’s muzzle flash, also locked in time?) Even light was
something
. I would shed even that like a cocoon. There would only be darkness and sweet nothingness: the only Heaven I could crave, believe in, or invent.
At last…at long last…after all my suffering on Earth…after all my suffering in Hell, though now I knew it had lasted only a fraction of a microsecond in a mind gone kaleidoscopically insane with its obliteration…I was free. I was filled with peace.
In nothingness I was reborn. I was the phoenix of oblivion.
I was the fleeting thought and the fleeing soul of a suicidal God.
…but when I awakened, I stared at cracks in the plaster ceiling that looked so real, so mundane. It was only illusion that this was all just an illusion. It was only a dream that this was all simply a dream. Or, rather, the ceiling was indeed an illusion. But it would protect me from the illusion of the lava rain. And the hunger gurgling in my belly was only an illusion, but I had to rise now and chew my illusionary bread, drink my hallucinatory tea.
My head never did truly, literally regenerate after that shotgun blast. But I lifted it, nonetheless, from my pillow so I could breakfast and write these words.
Day 64.
I
’ve had this bug or flu for several days; it started out as a cold but now I’m feverish, light-headed, with an intensely focused pain behind the bridge of my nose and one eye like a sinus headache. Since I arrived in Hell, I’ve seen people with rashes, sores…sneezing, sniffling…hacking up phlegm, vomiting in the street. Are our ailments imaginary, illusionary—in a sense, psychosomatic? Are we all hypochondriacs, deluded into our respective sicknesses? Or does the Creator manufacture demonic microorganisms as He does those flesh-eating crabs and air-swimming eels, to torment us from within? Last night I had a feverish dream, inspired by a drawing by a 15th Century artist in one of my parents’ books, which had terrified but fascinated me as a boy. It showed St. Anthony being set upon by colorfully bizarre demons who tugged at his garments and hair, clawed him, raised clubs to smite him. I imagined these demons inside my body, and tearing at my blood cells like that, biting into them, ripping them to shreds. Microscopic vampires.
Bad as I felt tonight, I needed to get out of my claustrophobic flat, so I dragged my sorry carcass down to a café of sorts I discovered recently on an idle walk. The place is just called Blue. I think any place in Oblivion that might call itself Hellishly Good, Devil’s Food, or something cute like that would be set upon by a very humorless mob.
It’s one large, gloomy, low-ceilinged room, with most of its light coming from gas jets burning inside open-topped glass globes, set into the rough stone walls. The odorless, hissing gas is blue…hence the aqueous glow to everything…hence the name of the establishment.
I’ve heard there are secret places in Oblivion—speakeasies, really—where you can buy rotgut, moonshine, whatever they choose to call the half-poisonous brews that are concocted in the black market’s stills. (Just as I’ve heard there are drugs to be had in Oblivion; but I was never much into those, even in life.) But Blue is right there open to the street, and so it doesn’t take chances. There are places where you can buy a steak made from one of those animals provided for the Neanderthals and such, and not from human flesh…but if one is caught eating or selling this meat, which is not intended for those of us who had the opportunity to be enlightened by the Creator’s only child, then one can be expected to be harshly punished. Being eaten alive by baboon Demons is, I understand, a typical response.
So in Blue, one eats human meat dishes (not me, though; I still haven’t given in to that and I hope I never will). There’s cool water to drink, brought into Oblivion from outside its borders via underground pipelines, I’ve learned. (It only rains lava, not water, in Oblivion, where there are no clouds above to cover the fiery sky.) There is an artfully concocted imitation coffee available that is almost as good as the worst decaf I have ever tasted, watery and weak and bitter, but hot and dark, at least. Much more successful is their hot mulled cider, which tastes like an instant brand I used to buy in life. Nowhere near actual mulled cider, but still nostalgically approximate. I enjoyed one tonight, letting its aromatic steam rise up into my face as if it might clear my sinuses, hunkered over my small sticky table in a cave-like stony corner.
The first time I’d come here, I’d found two musicians sitting on a scrap of stage, playing lovingly made lutes. Another patron told me the musicians had died centuries earlier. While they played, I saw a woman at a nearby table weeping softly.
Tonight there were no musicians. I had hoped to catch one of the jazz acts I’d heard about. I contented myself with chewing my salad, sipping my drink and eavesdropping on the conversations of those around me. I was comforted by the proximity of other people, by their laughter, by the atmosphere of near normalcy…but I had no desire to interact with any of these people on an intimate level. In life I had always been reserved, introverted, not unusual traits for a writer…but here, I am even more withdrawn. Traumatized, still. My soul dazed and stumbling even two months into eternity. At work I resist the efforts of several other laborers to draw me into friendship. But I’m not singular in this respect; the boisterous, guffawing sorts are definitely in the minority. Many of us shuffle through our days, smiling shadows of smiles at each other, if at all. The walking wounded.
I didn’t hear the door to the café open, but I did notice the sudden lull in conversation, the abrupt suppression of laughter, and this is what caused me to turn toward the entrance. In the threshold there was a Demon, and I recognized her appealing haircut like Louise Brooks in
Lulu
, short and glossy black with bangs hiding her eyebrows. She was the Demon I had seen with Chara back on, I think, Day 47, dragging a man out of his home…