The Place Below

God is rules, the ability to predict the future based on the past. Hell is the lack of all that.

I’m not totally sure how it works. I’m thinking some part of you sublimes when you die, and deposits every essential y-o-u part into this nameless place, informally known as Hell. Because that’s straight where you go, rain or shine, God or none, when your physical body finally fails you.

And it’s not a bad place. Except for all the music. It all plays at the same time, coming from every direction -- hip-hop bleeding into jazz bleeding into heavy metal bleeding into everything else, making my ears bleed too.

Luckily, I’m prepared when I arrive -- there are a nice pair of headphones in my front pocket, a wire leading to this square thing with the music on it. It’s already singing Beethoven straight out so I don’t hesitate to scrape the blood out of my ears and slip it in, taking the first breath of the hour as a single piece fills my head in its violent ups-and-downs. My legs twitch with the mountains of clean sound -- and I look around.

The kid I stabbed is deposited some feet away, curled up on the moist tongue of Hell. The mirages -- Wisps, they’re called --  surround him, spouting condescensions and promises and insults. No one touches him, other than an old man who runs fingers through the boy’s greasy hair. He’s shivering.

I waltz over, walking lopsided because that’s what the sounds call for -- stumbling, snapping movements. I sniff. It doesn’t smell so much like metal anymore, just stuffy -- a room with closed windows, sunlight after a sleepless summer night, too hot to stay unconscious past eight in the morning so you sit there in your own stench--

He opens his eyes and freezes upon recognizing me.

“Shoo,” I say to the Wisps. A few of them swirl and eddie out of my way and I approach the kid. He sits up, so I take out my headphones, wincing at the chorus surrounding us.

“Oh god,” his lips are saying, “Oh god, oh god.”

I watch the Old Man Wisp, knobbly hands massaging the boy’s shoulders, and then one of them slides down his chest, down down down past the navel--

“Oh god, why didn’t I tell anyone? He touched-- why didn’t I--” he wriggles under the grip of the the old man-- “--get off.”

I eye the Old Man’s crotch tent. He’s getting off alright.

Twitch, twitch, twitching my arm, I extend a hand to the boy. He better be glad his face isn’t crushed like how I left it, he better be glad his penis is intact. I reach up with my free hand to touch my lower eyelid. I better be glad I’ve still got an eye, I better be glad. Stab, stab, stab. I crushed his heart and his face and his crotch when I was up there. I fulfilled his wish to die, to die, today. Snap, snap, snap. I severed my optical nerve when I was up there. I witnessed the mitosis of the universe.

“Hey,” I shake my arm, “Take it or leave it.”

Gratefully, the boy takes my cold hand in his warm ones and tugs at me, staring searchingly at my nose. “You’re not haunting me, are you? Are you like the rest?”

I frown. “I stabbed you in the chest.”

“Oh. Did you?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Where am I?”

“Hell.”

“Oh. Wait. That’s not a real--”

“We’ve had this conversation,” I interrupt. “When you were alive. Obviously you were wrong. Get up, please. I can’t--” I cough. There are pockets of thick air scattered throughout this place, and they can only be described as ‘waiting rooms.’ It’s where the souls get caught in between death and deposition. They float around, sometimes dense and other times just barely visible. You’ve gotta be careful you don’t walk into a cloud the way I’ve just done.

We’re both coughing now, and I wave at the thick air. Disjointed voices complain at the disturbance. I hate breathing human. They get stuck in your lungs, bits of flesh depositing along the throat’s cartilage rings. It’s a b***h, generally unpleasant for everyone -- after all, no one likes to blink themselves into existence only to realize a chunk of their face is missing, having stuck itself cancerously to the insides of some unfortunate little boy.

“Get up. We’re going.”

The kid finally listens, uses my hand to stand, swatting uselessly at the gaseous images of loved ones, hated ones, anyone who’d ever stuck a metaphorical thorn in his gray matter. The Wisps that look like him are the worst -- bleeding all over the place, spitting depressing clichés and wandering with aimless looks in their eyes, murmuring existential questions. “Why are we so afraid to be vulnerable?” one of them asks me. I slap at it and he dissolves, but not before moaning something about how such an end to his life was inevitable.

“Dude!” says the real edition of the kid, gaping at the place his other body had been.

“You were being annoying,” I say, and I stick the headphones back in my ears before he can argue. “C’mon.” We walk. I can’t hear him, but he’s probably asking where we are, what the hell is that, why aren’t you listening to me--? The usual.

I could listen to him. I could answer his questions. I could say, “Hey, whatever your name is, you don’t wanna end up like me. Every time I come back here, I get worse. Worse and worse and worse and the music never leaves, it never leaves, it never leaves. It gets stuck and it never leaves.” It never leaves. Yes, and he’d stare at me. Perhaps he’d be afraid. Perhaps he’d ask more questions, which is what he would do if he was an idiot. Yes, yes, yes, yes indeed, I could take out my headphones, ease his confusion, all that.

But I don’t feel like suffering anymore on his behalf. My ears already itch like a m**********r and the headphones -- ‘waterproof’ said the advertisement -- are sliding slick around my ear cavity. Blood squeezes out around them, which is just what I get for allowing myself to listen to the chaos.

It used to be okay. Once upon a time, there was maybe only one song playing, maybe even no songs at all. It’s all about entropy, though -- chaos is the easiest route, the inevitable route, according to the universal laws.  So with each passing moment, the white noise will rise, will fill and destroy everything, will absorb the filthy mixed colors of every imagined genre. There’ll only be more in the future.

At last, we’re out of what is colloquially known as “Hell’s mouth.” It’s humid in there, the ground soft, moist, and black with small ridges everywhere. The walls arch into darkness, smelling so old and musty, you wonder if you’ve awakened within a carcass. Right by the swell of the walls lie rows and rows of smooth, white rock formations, caked with a colorless paste, the sour smell of infection. We’ve managed to squeeze through some of the white rocks, out onto the plains, and still the kid feels the need to look back. I tug him hard, like a dog, so he’ll follow me, follow the pulsing sounds -- it is not the source, but the destination of all noise. It’s known as “the Ear.”

It takes a long bit of walking to reach the Ear. Wisps don’t come here, which is why I do. That and it’s not a bad place to wait til I sublime again. It’s cool, dim, without smell, with many other folks wandering around, making a death for themselves.

I turn to look at the kid, and he’s for some reason bleeding from every possible f*****g orifice. I sigh and slip an emergency cloth from my pocket, rubbing roughly at the caked edges of his nose. He stares vacantly at me as I handle him like a child. Yanking an earphone away (it was on the third movement and my heart had started to beat in circles) I glare and say, “Happy now?”

“Huh?”

“This is what you get for wanting to die. You had to drag me with you, a*****e.”

He blinks. “You killed me.”

“Only because you wanted to die!”

“Well, gee, thanks for helpin’ out,” some blood shoots out of his mouth, right onto my cheek. I don’t bother wiping it away with the cloth, only lick what’s in reach with my own swelling tongue. Noxious air is ripping at my cells--

Generally, ‘hell’ is not so unpleasant. There’s a place I like to go, where everyone eventually congregates, but when you’re out in the wild parts, it sucks a*s.

“C’mon, let’s go.”

I put my headphones in again. As we walk deeper into the Ear, I find myself having to stop with increasing frequency. The boy doubles over every few minutes, hands on his ears, shivering and bleeding. I can read his lips: oh god, he says, oh god. Oh god it hurts. God, oh god.

I drag him along, and at some point he goes limp -- he’s awake, crying out I’m sure, writhing in pain. One of his ribs snaps from the sheer intensity of his movement, jabs outward through the flesh. I can see the jagged edge through a torn portion of his t-shirt.

I try to forgive him for slowing us down. He doesn’t know what lies at the center of Hell. He doesn’t realize that that is where he will find relief. I feel the sound in my bones, I feel the splintering, fracturing, of my very soul, cracks crawling up organs and through membranes, around flesh and lumps and my still heart. It all breaks as you go. It is just what you must do as a faithful patron of this place. It is the toll.

The boy makes it worse. He’s dragging the pain, he’s an extra scrape of sound. I consider killing him again, slashing apart his transparent soul pocket until he’s stuck here, crammed in the fleshy corners of it all, forced for eternity to live among the growing chaos.

But I calm myself. Portable Beethoven allows me to chill out. Four-four time, it is full, I can walk, I can think, I can be sane.

“Kid?” I say, “Can you hear me?”

I look back. He’s all twisted up, broken, and he doesn’t acknowledge my words.

“I will answer your questions,” I say. Still nothing. I smile and start talking.

∆≤≥∆≤≥∆≤≥∆≤≥∆≤≥∆≤≥∆≤≥∆≤≥∆≤≥∆

God is logic, reality. God is rules, the ability to predict the future based on the past. God is a stable construct, like time or space or… or whatever. Hell is the lack of all that. Here, when I speak, I speak as God. I speak in order and according to rules. Fucked up rules -- rules that may not be in the best interest of those listening or talking -- but rules nonetheless. We bring god wherever we go because we bring order -- these souls, these Wisps, have lost their language. They’ve lost everything that keeps them within the lines. They have become part of Hell’s scenery.

And their ability to speak?

Nothing but an imitation. Nothing but voices bouncing off cave walls. Their voices originate within your order. They are the dark light of your god. You are responsible for the faces you see.

The wisps themselves? They are nothing but particle clouds.

Everything you see is a lie. Everything you see is another product of God within you -- there is no ground, no walls, it all fluctuates, shifts. We are not seeing the same thing, you and me, because all of what we see is an interpretation of Nothing. We are at least protected from dissolving, just because we are surrounded by other would-be humans… But that doesn’t make this place real. For christ’s sake, look at this microscope -- the tube part is made of hot dog meat. Does that make sense to you? No. There’s no f*****g sense down here! We’re in a giant ear.

The boy blinks at me from where he lies on a broken cot. “That doesn’t look like a microscope.”

“Exactly my point.” I stand up from his bedside and return the microscope to the laboratory desk.

“No, I mean, I don’t think it’s a microscope. It kinda looks like a fancy sex toy.”

I sigh at his ignorance. “There’s no sex down here.”

He blinks. “What?”

“Yes. Don’t bother trying to do it yourself either. Really doesn’t work out, unless you want more Wisps coming out of your hot dog tube. I mean, they disappear pretty quickly, but it’s not pleasurable.” I shrug.

The boy shudders and tries to turn over in the cot. His bones have been glued back into place and I’ve cleaned the blood out of his corners, but he still moves like a broken marionette; it makes me want to kill him all over again. “Do I ever get to leave?”

I smile. Bump, bump, bump. It’s quiet in here, but I can still sense the underlying music, the steady vibration of atoms, curling in a waltz they go, one-two-three, one-two-three. When the boy’s muscles expand and contract, they do so according to the Universe, the ebb and flow of all matter, push pull push pull push pull--

“Hey.”

My face hurts. I stop smiling. “Yes?”

“I get to leave, don’t I?”

That’s quite an entitled question. I’ve led a few people in my time, brought them to the Ear, sometimes even been the ones to subject them to Hell’s experience. Not one of them has asked to leave. It is against the rules. You don’t have to understand this place to know that. It is something you’re born with.

The boy will not accept this. “But you can leave. Why can’t I?”

I tap my skull. “Nuh-uh-uuuh, you don’t wanna do what I do. I am dissolving! Dissolving through the generations! You will exist here forever. I will not. I will be the walls, the sounds! Everything splinters! You don’t wanna do what I do.”

“But,” he sits up, wincing. “That’s what I wanted in the first place. What’s the point of killing yourself if you’re still conscious afterwards? I just want to be nothing!”

“You are nothing.” He does not appear reassured. “You are stupid and you are nothing. I exist for generations before I turn too--” my neck twitches, snaps and rights itself, “--too inhuman! Or, whatever, I’m not clear on what it is that disqualifies me from.. from this position or whatever. I used to be like you. Stupid, that is. It is not worth it, you don’t know what you want, you will never know.”

Now he’s getting up. Feet touching the ground, waxy smooth. “Do you hear yourself? What is the point of continuing to exist if I will never know what it’s like to want to be alive?”

“God damn it! You last forever, not your stupid f*****g desire to die!” I’m grinning hard, it hurts, a rip at either side of my mouth. It will tear with a sound like a severed sandwich!

“Please,” The kid drops to the ground. He’s on his knees. “I’m not -- I wanna go home. Look, it’s. I hate this place. Please, it’s awful.” He is remembering the old man. He does not say this, but I can guess because that Wisp was the strongest of them all. Invasive creature, it was!

“You wanna leave.”

“Yes.”

Hmm. I could put up a fight. But that means continued annoyance, which is boring. So instead I grab his neck, twist it around and push it into his body like a button. He doesn’t have time to scream, which is good, because that is also annoying. Instead, I can hear muffled protest from somewhere within his body. When he is good n’ squashed, I sit with my arms around his crumpled body, waiting to sublime. And when I do, it’s possible he’ll come with me. If he doesn’t -- well, that sucks for him.

Author's Note

Gimme watcha got. Tell me what's cool, what's not. Are u into my rhymin'? OK I'll stop.
So as usual, try to back up your criticisms with examples, and you're also free to just give your general opinion of the piece too.