Bedlam and Other Stories

by John Domini

  “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, Love
r. 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:

  Kookaberry sitting in the old gum tree:

  Merry, merry king of the bush is he.

  Laugh Kookaberry, laugh Kookaberry,

  Gay your life must be.

  With all these new cooperative ventures, the relationship between Miplip and myself changed. I say it changed, but I cannot define that change with any real precision. We never became friendly, exactly. My overseer never once accepted any of my proposals for our shows, not without first altering it enough to call the proposal his own, and I continued to slip away by myself and try to speak in a human voice, so that I might hear once again that forgotten sound, echoing among the stony retreats of my world. Yet the relationship did change. I do believe that the ferocity of his insults declined, and the number of them as well, but that is only a feeling. And so the one concrete proof of our changed relationship that I can offer—if indeed it is concrete proof, if indeed it was a changed relationship—is the fact that Miplip and I became lovers.

  By accident, during an unusually lengthy show, I discovered that if my designs were done with proper force they would remain as they were for a good long while, without my attention. I began joining Miplip onstage, after that. At first, having nothing better to do, we depicted the story of that man who had passed through unscathed. Miplip played him and his guide (they were reporters of some kind, investigators, we had learned by then), linked at the hands, while I did my best to represent the many fearsome torments of Hell. Our goal was to stir up jealousy and despair in our audience, but it just seemed unrealistic to expect only jealousy and despair—that is, jealousy and despair unmixed with a sense of human triumph—and so that show was dropped. Our next idea was to parody the human sexual act.

  Most of our charges had been rendered impotent, in their post-Judgment bodies, and the others had been condemned to insatiable lust. Therefore sex was the perfect subject for a show, dividing our audiences into mutually antagonistic extremes. We would pit some picture of innocence, such as Miplip’s girl on a swing, against my febrile approach, and the effect on our guilt-ridden spectators, all of whom had at one time or another allowed their own good natures to be usurped by evil, was immensely gratifying. Even those that did not leap upon their fellows in a paroxysm of need were nonetheless overwhelmed: they wept, waving their arms, clapping their hands, flopping about, and they silently shouted and shouted. During one such performance…

  Oh yes, I remember. I may not remember the moment Miplip and I were first brought together—thrown together, forced together—but this I remember. My overseer had assumed the form of a loving and discreet young mother, sitting in a rocker, smiling gently, knitting some garment for a child while at home alone one evening (that I had painted, darkly shining, outside windows I had painted), and then I finished my painting and climbed in through one of my illusory windows, menacingly drew near, and took hold. Him? Her? Miplip? What did it matter? A human form. And I went into my puppet act, the same act that according to Miplip tired husbands and tired wives had once enacted repeatedly in their own incomprehensible imaginations, and not just tired husbands and tired wives but lovers too, lovers, imagining other races and mechanical devices and other species when they had no devils handy, because somehow that husband or wife or moment’s lover was not enough (in all that magnificent world’s variety—not enough! Perhaps the idea was only one of Miplip’s tales, something to keep me cynical and in control of myself), but even while meditating this way I experienced the impossible tremor that uprooted my stagnant spirit, shook it so it would not be held still, and informed me that there would be no puppetry because this was no act, it was not a suggestion but an order, and Miplip heard the order too because in wholehearted response he at once caused his wifely clothing and rocking chair and uncompleted knitting to disappear, and lay naked beneath me on the air. I closed my eyes; they were all too familiar with his deceit. In my arms he became human.

  Unfortunately, genuine sexual congress between myself and Miplip had a ruinous side effect. I did not notice this side effect that first time, because I kept my eyes closed, and my overseer remained blind to what was happening a much longer time, a lack of perception which woul
d have disastrous ramifications. This side effect occurred, always, at the moment of climax. Devils do experience climax—the letting go, the timelessness. At his climax, Miplip would lose control of his morphology and revert momentarily to his natural state. On top of that, he would return to himself as he was at that moment: in transports.

  From his natural ugliness he then always returned, as the orgasm wore off, to his previous shape. Whatever small changes were thus produced he either ignored or failed to notice. It was a humiliating, not to say sickening, process. And as for myself, well, I lacked the heart to tell him. Implausible as it sounds, centuries passed before Miplip learned what our lovemaking did to him.

  Look at that: “It was a humiliating process.” For him, of course. “And as for myself, I lacked the heart.” The word for it is revenge, one might think. But I cannot agree that revenge was my sole motive in continuing our onstage trysts, even as much as I hated Miplip, even as long as it had been since I held the upper hand. I was shocked, more than anything else. In the rising steam of new emotions brought on by our lovemaking I lost sight of any one particular feeling; only much later on did I recognize sour little Revenge among them. By then I had long since gotten even, long since, so debasing were Miplip’s transformations.

  Indeed, in all the uncountable times my overseer and I had intercourse, his sudden metamorphosis never caused me to feel any emotion but sadness. How could it have done otherwise? I made sure always to finish quickly, while I was still connected with a human being, because when Miplip reverted to his natural shape my blood shrank with acute, total disappointment. To fall from inexplicable rapture to this repulsive eyesore of a rutting partner from whom I was never free…who can find revenge in that? Oh, there was some satisfaction earlier on, before I finished. I do not deny feeling happy then, in those brief moments. But then, to wait…to know what was about to happen…every single time I wondered if I could possibly survive (though how I got the idea that there is anything besides survival, I cannot imagine), and yet every single time I survived, and Miplip survived, and together we would return to ourselves, transient Lords of partial Torture over some of our unforgiven subjects.