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.
At first, in order to be sure of the efficiency of our new tack, we had to descend among the damned and inspect our audience after each show. They were not writhing, or clawing at their eyes and hair, or biting themselves in a mad frenzy, as they had done earlier, and so we had to investigate. It was upsetting to walk among them — so near, so repugnant and so fascinating at once. Could we possibly understand them? How did we ever hope to know what caused them pain? Would they never speak? But then Miplip and I discovered they were weeping. Open, unchecked; it had been millenia at least since we had seen such weeping. We looked closely, making sure, because as devils we lacked the physiological tools necessary for crying. When we saw their puffed, blinking, quivering eyelids, and their wet cheeks and lips and chins, we rejoiced. Their silence was not free from pain.
We took to punishing our audience immediately after each show, as a vivid reminder — made more vivid by what they had just seen — of where they were and where they would stay (on the negative side, this did seem to stop their weeping; they did not weep as we beat them). Then we added music to our charades. The single earthly tune Miplip could recall was a mere jingle, something he said he once heard a boy singing to a girl, but he sang it nonetheless. Assuming the form of a sweet-looking girl, on a swing perhaps, or sometimes even in the form of both children, wrapped in each other’s arms, Miplip would then screech out, malevolently, in his harsh and lowdown devil’s voice: