Normal was sometimes miles apart.
“You know what I hate the most?” she said. “That I don’t even want to stay up with you. You’ll only be around for what? A couple of hours more? I should want to get in every last minute. But I don’t know what to say to you, really. There’s nothing new to say about it. I feel like going to sleep.”
“It’s coming fast,” I said, just to set her straight. “I think it’s more like half an hour now.”
“Oh,” she said.
“But no hard feelings. Go to sleep. I understand.”
“I have to,” she said. “I have to get up in the morning. I feel sick from crying.” She slid under the covers and hugged me at the waist. “Tom?” she said, in a smaller voice.
“Maureen.”
“Is it getting faster?”
“It’s just this one time,” I said. “It probably doesn’t mean anything. It’s just painful to go through—”
“Okay,” she said. “I love you, Tom.”
“I love you too,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
She went to sleep then, while I lay awake beside her, waiting to cross over.
If Maureen hadn’t still been in school when I died, that would have been the end of it. If she hadn’t been in debt up to her ears, and still two years away from setting up an office. As it was I had to sit in cold pack for three months while her lawyer pushed the application through. Eventually the courts saw it her way: I was the breadwinner. So they thawed me out.
Now she was supposed to be happy. I kept food on the table, and she had her graduate degree. Her son grew up knowing his dad. It wasn’t supposed to matter that my soul shuttled between my living body here on earth, and Hell. She wasn’t supposed to complain about that.
Besides, it wasn’t my fault.
2
In Hell I’m a small boy.
Younger than Peter. Eight or nine, I’d guess.
I always start in the same place. The beginning is always the same. I’m at that table, in that damned garden, waiting for the witch.
Let me be more specific. I begin as a detail in a tableau: four of us children are seated in a semicircle around a black cast-iron garden table. We sit in matching iron chairs. The lawn beneath us is freshly mowed; the gardener, if there is one, permits dandelions but not crabgrass. At the edge of the lawn is a scrubby border of rosebushes. Beyond that, a forest.
Behind me, when I turn to look, there’s a pair of awkward birch saplings. Behind them, the witch’s house. Smoke tumbles out of the slate chimney. The witch is supposed to be making us breakfast.
We’re supposed to wait. Quietly.
Time is a little slow there, at Hell’s entrance. I’ve waited there with the other children, bickering, playing with the silverware, curling the lace doily under my setting into a tight coil, for what seems like years. Breakfast is never served. Never. The sun, which is hanging just beyond the tops of the trees, never sets. Time stands still there. Which is not to say we sit frozen like statues. Far from it. We’re a bunch of hungry children, and we make all kinds of trouble.
But I’m leaving something out.
We sit in a semicircle. That’s to make room for the witch’s horse. The witch’s horse takes up a quarter of the table. He’s seated in front of a place like any other guest.
He’s waiting for breakfast, too.
The witch’s horse is disgusting. The veins under his eyes quiver and he squirms in his seat. His forelegs are chained and staked to keep him at the table. He’s sitting on his tail, so he can’t swat away the flies which gather and drink at the comers of his mouth. The witch’s horse is wearing a rusted pair of cast-iron eyeglass frames on his nose. They’re for show, I guess, but they don’t fit right. They chafe a pair of raw pink gutters into the sides of his nose.
If I stay at the table and wait for breakfast, subtle changes do occur. Most often the other children get restless, and begin to argue or play, and the table is jostled, and the silverware clatters, and the horse snorts in fear, his yellow eyes leaking. Sometimes a snake or a fox slithers across the lawn and frightens the horse, and he rattles his chains, and the children murmur and giggle. Once a bird flew overhead and splattered oily white birdshit onto the teapot. It was a welcome distraction, like anything else.
Every once in a while the children decide to feel sorry for the horse, and mount a campaign to lure him forward and pluck the glasses from his nose, or daub at his gashes with a wadded-up doily. I tried to help them once, when I was new to Hell. I felt sorry for the horse, too. That was before I saw him and the witch ride together in the forest. When I saw them ride I knew the horse and the witch were in it together.
Seeing them ride, howling and grunting through the trees, is one of the worst things I experience in all of Hell. After the first time I didn’t feel sorry for the horse at all.
Whatever the cause, disturbances at the garden table are always resolved the same way. The activity reaches some pitch, the table seems about to overturn, when suddenly there’s a sound at the door of the witch’s house. We all freeze in our places, breath held. Even the horse knows to sit stock-still, and the only sound that remains is the buzzing of the flies.
We all watch for movement at the door of the witch’s house. On the slim hope that maybe, just this once, it’s breakfast time. The door opens, just a crack, just enough, and the witch slips out. She’s smiling. She’s very beautiful, the witch. The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, actually. She’s got a great smile. The witch walks out across the lawn, and stops halfway between her door and the table. By now we’re all slumped obediently in our seats again. My heart, to be honest, is in my throat.
I’m in love.
“Breakfast will be ready soon,” sings the witch. “So just sit quietly, don’t bother Horse, and before you know it I’ll have something delicious on the table—”
And then she turns and slips back through her doorway and we start all over again.
That’s how Hell begins. Maybe if I were a little more patient — waited, say, a thousand years instead of just a hundred — breakfast would appear. But then, knowing Hell, I’m not sure I’d want to see what the witch has been cooking up all this time.
But I don’t wait at all anymore. I get up and walk away from the table right away.
Time in Hell doesn’t start until you get up from the garden table.
3
The Hell in the computer starts out the same way mine does: in the garden.
Peter laid it all out like Dungeons and Dragons, like a role-playing computer game. We entered a long description of the scene; the other children, the witch’s horse, the witch. It was Peter’s idea, when I came back with my first tentative reports of what I’d gone through, to map it out with the computer. I think he had the idea that it was like one of his dungeons, and that if we persisted we would eventually find a way out.
So Peter’s “Dad” character wakes up at the garden table, same as I do. And when Peter types in a command, like GET UP FROM THE TABLE, WALK NORTH ACROSS THE LAWN, his “Dad” goes to explore a computer version of the Hell I inhabit.
I don’t soft-pedal it. I report what I see, and he enters it into the computer. Factually, we’re recreating my Hell. The only thing I spare him are my emotional responses. I omit my fear at what I encounter, my rage at living these moments again and again, my unconscionable lust for the witch…
4
When I crossed over that night, after fighting with Maureen, I didn’t dawdle at the garden table. I was bored with that by now. I pushed my chair back and started in the direction Peter and I call north; the opposite direction from the witch’s house. I ran on my eight-year-old legs across the lawn, through a gap in the border of rosebushes, and into the edge of the forest.