Windows Into Hell

by James Wymore

  I saw my parents struggle in ways I never understood as a child. I saw their challenges and fears. I could tell better now, after a lifetime of the same, how hard their life had been and how completely sequestered from the reality of their experience I had been. There was so much I never understood. Even as an adult myself, somehow I never thought of them as anything but my parents. Now, I could not hold back my ghost self’s tears when I saw what they were going through.

  The emotions of living my life over again were profound. I wept with myself often. However, sometimes, I could not help but be disgusted with how petty and unforgiving I appeared. I could have been kinder. I could have stood up for myself more. I could have done better… but then, what forces I was under! What tricks of mind and body drove me helter-skelter over the landscape of living! I could have also done so much worse.

  As I neared my death. I realized there could be no greater hell than watching your life unfold with a full knowledge of how you were constructed. To view your own missteps in full light of what you could control and what you could not and see yourself bumble with the tools you were handed so spectacularly was horrific. I could have been a better husband. And my kids? Why was reading the paper more important than going outside to look at a dam my kids had built in the gutter? They were so excited, and yet there I sat, reading something that mattered not one wit. I never saw that dam, and right now it seems like I missed the most important thing going on in the world. So many times I chose simple trivia over people that I genuinely loved. Why? It made no sense. Yet over and over again I missed engaging with those I cared most about.

  I stood watching myself die. I was happy it was nearly over. In the rushed and confused scene with the demon, I recalled a glorious paradise awaited me. I at last relaxed, knowing this as I died a second time. It had been Hell. It was time for Heaven.

  Except, I did not die. Once again, I heard the screams. I saw the blood as I was born again into the world. Into a home this time, not a hospital. On a kitchen table, clearly in a different time and place, and as I pieced things together—again in full possession of the two lives I had just passed through, I begin to recognize my surroundings. Old memories from my childhood meshed with this place. I was in my grandmother’s house on Fifth East in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was embedded once again in a person, but this time it was my father instead of me. No child should have to watch the secret dreams of their father. My dad should have been invested with rights that precluded his child from ever being so intimately exposed to such secrets. I passed through his life in sorrow, for I saw his fears, dashed hopes, his disasters, and temptations. This was not for me! I shouted at the heavens.

  Yet I found comfort that I was loved. I disappointed him and made him proud. He was grateful for me and resented me. Like my life, his was full of confusion about who he was and what he should do. One of his most painful experiences was when he’d been bypassed for a promotion. Every day he’d worked hard. It was clear he’d invested much into doing his job to the best of his ability, using every ounce of his creativity and talent. How could he not have pride at what he had accomplished for his company? How could he not get the promotion? Not for a second did he doubt it would be bestowed. No one had worked harder and he had done a tremendous job! Then someone else got it. Someone undeserving by his lights. It wrecked him and consigned him for years into the depths of despair. In some ways, he never recovered.

  Yet, to us, he just said, “Well, I didn’t get the promotion, c’est la vie .”

  My mother, nor us kids, ever knew what this did to him.

  So many triumphs. So many despairs. I had been there for his death. I saw it again, only this time through his own eyes. Perhaps now I could be released, but I was less confident than before.

  I was my mother next, then my wife, and children, followed by my brothers and sisters. My wife was the most painful life to experience in such fullness. With both my wife and mother, I was shocked at how different it was to be a woman. How differently the world was presented to my heart and mind. It was not in intelligence or in some perceptual ability. I saw my children in a new light as she interacted with them in ways I had not. It was if I saw them now more deeply and completely, as if from a new dimension. Not completely other, as I had understood these things as well. It was hard to describe, but it was if being a woman added new flavors to the palate of experience. I suspect had I started as a woman, being a man would be described similarly. Even so, I felt richer from having experienced it.

  It did not stop with my family. On and on it went. One after another. I cycled through every person I’d ever met. I seemed to get placed as a ghost in order of their proximity to me in life. In an ever expanding embodiment of all those who I had ever encountered. My best friends. Cousins. My aunts and uncles, then grandparents and co-workers. My teachers, then officers I knew in the military. One by one and on and on, I lived their lives with more familiarity than they had lived themselves (just as I had with my own life). I was surprised how similar and how different all of our struggles were! How painful and how mixed life was with its joys and sorrows. How complicated! I found myself cheering people on, hoping they would give in to their best nature when that little space for freedom sauntered in. I wept when they did not follow their better self. When they slept I slept with them, when they were tired I was too. Strangely, my dreams mirrored theirs. It turns out that dreams are informative, combining freedom, fate, and the challenges of winding a path among them in surprising ways.

  There was a strange thing. Occasionally, like my sense of how much of the person I attended was influenced by genes or experience, there was a sense that someone was accompanying people I met. A slight hint that there was another being in attendance. Something in their eyes seemed to reveal the presence of another ghost, like me, trapped and watching. Another inhabitant of Hell?

  I had a vague hope that when I had ghosted all my lifelong encounters, this Hell would fold up and disappear and I would be released to a heaven where I would enter into a space that I might enjoy freedom and choice again, rather than this endless reel-to-reel of fixed observation. Perhaps most horrible of all, I could never affect anything. I was never able to turn away and say no, not this—and in truth there was never a day that went by that I did not try.

  Is this what it’s like for God? Is He ever stuck watching all that transpires with a fixed eye? Like me, is He locked into an omniscient stare, such that all the pain and hurt of the world is paraded before Him? Is there nothing He can ever do to turn his head from the scene, or to step away and go for a walk in a solitary forest and flee from the barrage of horror and pain that never ends? I shudder as I think it. Not even a monstrous God so horrific deserves a Hell so barbaric. That is why I suspected I would be released soon. He would not make me endure all that He does.

  As I mentioned, there was a sense that others were trapped in lives like me. I could sense them. Perhaps, I thought, it was my imagination, but I began to detect subtle differences, as if tiny nuances of personality of these people were leaking through and that with effort I could recognize individual differences in the entities. I tried to communicate. Nothing. One in particular I called Isabeau after the star-crossed lover in the movie LadyHawk . I pretended we were in love. More and more often “she” showed up in partners of my host, and those lives tended to be better. More vibrant. Sometimes we would go centuries without sensing each other. But when we did, did I detect rejoicing?

  I was every member of the Bloods and every participant of the Crips. I was homeless on the streets of Wichita and dwelt in a mansion on Long Island inherited from old New England money. I fought on both sides of the Iraq War. I was an Inuit schoolteacher in Barrow, Alaska, and an alcoholic fundamentalist preacher in Forrest City, Arkansas. Every human was a unique instantiation of the type, and yet each so much the same—a small set of terrors and temptations. Given to abundant acts of kindness and yet, such astonishing cruelty as well.

  As I moved through the world
, I moved back in time. I gassed Jews in Auschwitz and led a march for freedom from Selma to Montgomery. And so as I moved back in time. I fought in every war while later praying for souls in Calcutta. It was a strange way to move through human history. I did not miss a single event, and understood every motivation for every player that ever lived from the lowest soldier marching from the kingdoms of the Kahn to Caesar.

  I do not think I am capable of going mad because if it were possible, I am sure I would have fallen into that state long ago. Especially without the occasional and rare appearance of Isabeau, which seemed to stabilize me a bit. Things affected me deeply and I wept with the individuals I possessed—feeling keenly their joys and loves, as well as their agonies.

  As the old joke goes, I could say to them with full honesty, “I feel your pain.”

  I have been tortured much as well as been the torturer, which too often it has been done in the name of some absent void or darkness dressed up as some feigned righteousness or justice. Some of Earth’s greatest evils emerged in acts such as this.

  I have also fallen in love many times, both men and women, for I experience keenly the lust and desire of whosever’s body I find myself. I’ve come to realize how much we are drawn to the beauty and desire of others. It consumes us. No other force is equal in both joy, and pain. So much of our thoughts and actions are geared and directed toward the desire of the caress and the touch of another. And there is nothing so painful as its lack. We are made to love and be loved.

  In addition, there is so much joy to be had in life! It is true there are lives of such misery that it truly would be better not to be born, but it is not as often as you might guess, and even some lives that appear withered and worn have had moments of joy and experiences that make their life worth having been placed here below. I always think of heaven as upward, and myself as below it, down here in Hell. Whenever I can, I gaze that direction though the eyes of my shell and try to catch the attention of whatever God might be gazing back.

  Perhaps my greatest love, besides the dear wife of my real life, was when I was a wine grower in Italy during the height of classical Rome. We lived on an isolated estate in Umbria. It was a time of great peace. Alypia. A beautiful woman. She expertly managed our fields and treated our slaves well (and I know it was largely true because I have been them all) and we arranged for their freedom and citizenship upon our death. Alypia. We traveled and made sacrifices to the gods. We read and danced with delight. Our children were strong, well educated, and we made good marriages for them. I took more delight in her than she did me. I chose to adopt Felix’s perspective. For he daily felt blessed by the gods for the presence of Alypia in his life. And the most wonderful thing of all? I saw my ghost friend Isabeau shining in the light of her eyes.

  Notice in the above how often I switch from “I” to “him” with a callous carelessness and nonchalance? I often became wrapped up in their lives so much I would forget that I was but an observant spirit. It was much like watching a good movie or a play that would take me away as in the days of my first life, sometimes I forgot I wasn’t the person in whom I was embedded.

  Often, I would be jarred back into the dualism of which I was just a part, a member of a cast of two as when the character of my observation would do something that I willed to go in another direction. Sometimes, our lives would be so congruent and harmonious with my own desires that I have lived entire lives without remembering that they weren’t really me, and I had no say in whether they turned left or right. Ran or fought. And when this lack of being able to vary from the course my host had set became so palpable, panic would rise in my soul, the feeling of being trapped would send me into mental paroxysms of fear. The desperate need to escape would press down on my soul with an unrelenting need to take one action that was mine bubbled through me.

  The feeling was similar to what I once experienced when I was young and a group of friends convinced me to crawl into a mummy sleeping bag headfirst. They wrapped a leather belt around my legs, pinning me within. I struggled and thrashed about, but I was helpless—closed in that narrow space, with my arms at my sides, unable to raise them to my head. I screamed and screamed, shouting that I couldn’t breathe. I cried and begged, all the while sure I would soon die and there was nothing I could do. Finally, I played dead and stopped responded to my companion’s taunts, and fearing they’d suffocated me, they let me out.

  At about this time, I notice, or I thought I noticed, that Isabeau appeared more and more in those I fell in love with. It is hard to say. Was it just my imagination?

  Time does strange things. I would pass through momentous events as if they were nothing, while fixating on some trivial thing for eons. I remember once I was a Syrian merchant. Wealthy and independent, I paid my bribes and taxes. I lived a well-provisioned house in Tyre where I owned a small fleet of trading vessels. I loved books of all kinds and had procured a large number of expensive and ancient manuscripts. When Valens, the Emperor of the East, began burning pagan books and scrolls (and often enough their owners), many of us decided that we were not safe keeping them and so burned many of the cheaper works and hid some of the more valuable ones by sending them to more secure ports. I remember burning a collection of documents written in palm leaves rolled together. On them was a transliteration of Greek written in Sanskrit by a deserter from Alexander’s army. I did not know at that time if it were authentic (anything reported to having some connection with Alexander would fetch a good price, so I had my doubts) and so threw it to the flames. I remember a strange sense of horror as I watched the leaves blacken, then ash, and then disappear as smoke in the air.

  As I moved back in time among my hosts, I found myself anticipating following the history of the palm leaf scroll—an idle curiosity about its origins became one of my obsessions. I was intent on finding or following certain objects that came from the past and whose unfolding lay in my future. For obscure reasons, some of these would infatuate me.

  I was surprised and delighted whenever a life gave a clue that allowed me to find a piece of the story of the scroll and see how it passed to the future where I, like Merlin, had previously lived, moving backward as I was in time. Whenever I held the scroll in my hand, sometimes as a merchant, or a collector, a librarian, or brigand, I would feel joy in the connection of that work. The feel of the leaves rarely meant anything to the person I dwelled in, however. I found delight in the texture of the dry abrasive surface, the fading ink, and fragility of the brittle surface.

  Until at last, I was attached to the man who’d written the moving account. It is filled with so much of the human condition—of both war and love, and much of the terror and joy that I’ve experienced. I repeat the words of the poem (or story) to myself often. I leave it here for your enjoyment (or dismissal). The title and subheadings are my own addition, as the palm leaves contained only the author’s words. The portrayed events are largely true, for I lived his life and observed these events transpiring in their fullness before he wrote this as an old man during the afternoon of a muggy day on the banks of the Narmada River. It is long, but I have nothing but time in these bodies to memorize that which I grow to love.

  Leaving the Storm Crows

  I. The Forgetting

  I look at you lying

  on the stony ground

  amid tufts of patchy grass

  that playfully worship

  the god of wind

  like children dancing to

  Apollo, or in honor to the king.

  Your hand rests beside you,

  curled as if forming a cup

  waiting for some offering

  of wine, or perhaps a coin.

  A Persian spear has pierced

  your soft eye, opening a slit

  wide and deep. The point

  of the blade must have been

  dulled when it finally reached

  the back of your helm,

  emptying forever your skull

  of thoughts—

&nbs
p; thoughts of home

  thoughts of glory

  thoughts of love

  thoughts of fame.

  I did not know you well. A

  little, only. I remember once when

  we were both wine-addled,

  raging in the heat of lust, and

  roaring through the streets,

  singing loud and manly that

  our names would live forever.

  Aye. That was the dream—that

  like Achilles,

  our names would live forever.

  We said it again as we rowed together

  against cold Aegean winds. Side by side

  feeling the hard beat of the

  leather drum deep in our bones,

  well-placed and throbbing in our

  wintry bones, our cold frozen bones.

  Our names would live forever.

  But here is the last truth—

  I cannot remember

  your name. You are there, on

  the ground, tossed hard by fate

  and your enemy’s spear. I know

  your wounded face, but that name

  by which your mother called you to dine,

  and by which your father commanded

  you to mind well the sword and spear

  and its dance, has fled me as if you were

  a stranger. I think hard, concentrating. I

  shake my head, trying to clear it, staring

  at your broken and still form,