he last thing I remembered was staring down the wrong end of a gun.
It had never happened to me before—obviously—and even though I remembered the other guy pulling the trigger, remembered the white-hot sound of the bullet poking a hole in me, the final flash of red pain… even though I remembered all of that, it was still hard to understand what was going on.
Killed in the line of duty.
I heard the voice in my head—my dad’s voice, always the old man—say the words. He’d always said that was the best way to go: killed in the line of duty.
But he hadn’t died that way. He died of a tumor that went from “impossible to see on the X-ray” to “the size of a golf ball, please put your affairs in order” in the space of six months. He would have loved to die in the line of duty . But not me. I didn’t really want to die at all, and if I had to die, I’d have preferred to be suffocated by the weight of the ten or twelve naked supermodels fighting over who got the first piece of me.
…Not looking at a fat, greasy blob of a man who pulled a gun out of his jacket so fast I thought I was seeing a magic show (Nothing up my sleeve! ) and then pulled the trigger. And then… he killed me.
Me.
Not that Dad would have admitted that the way I died was in the line of duty. He’d have bitched and made snide comments about my profession, about my job performance, about anything and everything I did. Dad always did that. He was “a good cop,” which to him meant being able to find my flaws and write the appropriate ticket for each one of his only son’s personal, professional, and social problems.
Dad never liked me much. The feeling was mutual. When he died, I didn’t cry. I managed to restrain myself from singing a rousing chorus of, “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” at his funeral service (which I paid for, by the way). But that was about all he got from me.
Dad didn’t die in the line of duty. I did, as far as I was concerned.
But that didn’t matter, because nothing I did was ever good enough for him.
Dad probably would have stood there and bitched at me as I got killed. And the worst part of that was that he would have been right. I should have seen that piece under the guy’s coat. But I didn’t, and I got shot. And then…
I looked around. For a second I didn’t understand where I was or what had happened. Then the memories came, and I knew. Knew I was dead. Had been killed , dammit all to hell.
Even though I understood what had happened, I still had no real idea where I was. I mean, it was an office of some kind, that was sure. But I’d never seen an office where every time a drawer opened, it sounded like someone was being tortured inside. Or a computer that kept shrieking with the sound of a thousand people being brutally murdered right before saying, “You have a new d-mail!” in a deep voice that sounded like that guy who does all the movie trailers that start, “In a world where nothing is safe,” and then shows things blowing up.
I didn’t understand what was going on. The screaming was getting to me. The bone-furniture was creeping me out.
And the guy? The dude sitting behind a desk that seemed to be resting on the posed skeletons of maybe a dozen toddlers and infants? Him I got least of all.
He was so ordinary. Just a guy. Skinny-ish, with brown hair that was pulling back a bit at the temples. Eyes of no discernible color, could have been brown or hazel or gray. His thick, horn-rimmed glasses kept settling on the tip of his nose no matter how often he shoved them back with his forefinger. A white button-up shirt—short sleeves and with an honest-to-goodness pocket protector that held maybe six hundred different pens. When God first invented the “nerd,” this was the prototype he used.
The guy—the Nerd—looked at me. He was sweating. A lot. Flop-sweat like you only see on people who are about to die or on uber-dorks who are about to begin social interaction. I didn’t think this guy was going to die—I assumed he’d already done so, like I had—so I got the sinking suspicion he was going to talk to me.
“Well, uh…” His attempt at a scintillating start fizzled out. He knuckled his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose for the umpteenth time and gave it another shot. “So, mister…” He flipped a few pages back and forth on the desk while the computer shrieked about more “d-mail.”
For a geek, this guy seemed very popular. Or he just got a lot of spam, which made a perverse sense—there’s no way spammers would let the trifling fact of one’s death get between you and their mortgage-lowering, penis-enlarging, hook-up-offering messages.
The Nerd sighed, like he was trying to figure out how to scratch his nuts in public or some other awful task. Maybe he was remembering his last botched attempt at a date. Maybe that was how he had died: trying for someone beyond his pay grade and being terminally kicked in the balls for his attempt.
“Mr. Vincent,” he began. “I’m going to level with you—”
“What’s your name?”
“What?” He blinked, almost like he wasn’t sure how he’d lost control of the conversation so quickly.
“You know my name, Poindexter. What’s yours?”
He gulped. “It’s—well… I… Look, you’re dead and we need to focus on that.”
I stood up. Went to the door at the back of the room. When I opened up my eyes after being killed, I was just… here . I had no idea what was on the other side of the office’s only door, but I figured I was about to get bad news from this dork, and I didn’t want to hear it.
Why did I think I had bad news waiting? Well, one, I was dead, and two, the way I lived wouldn’t exactly qualify me for sainthood.
I was in Hell. I knew it. I was sure of it. And I was sure as hell going to get out of it.
I had my hand on the doorknob in a flash, but when I twisted it, the thing wouldn’t move. Wouldn’t even rattle under my hands.
“Mr. Vincent, please,” began the Nerd.
I turned. Launched myself at him.
The move took him by surprise, which was what I intended. I grabbed him by the throat, and my other hand grabbed a letter opener from his desk. The letter opener had a bone blade and a haft that looked like a finger. I didn’t care what it was, or how it had come to be. It was pointy, and that’s all I needed.
The Nerd started sweating even more, which confirmed my suspicion that I could get out of this. People always fear a strong man willing to kill. Even in Hell. Maybe especially in Hell.
“All right, Eugene,” I said. “I’m going to shove this thing right through your carotid unless you tell me right now how to get out of here.”
The Nerd’s mouth opened and shut a few times. I realized I was holding him so tight he couldn’t breathe, so I loosened my grip on his throat just a bit.
He sucked in a huge breath of air. “I can’t tell you,” he choked out.
I started pressing down with the macabre letter opener. Blood welled. “Wrong answer.”
“Wait!” he gasped. “I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”
“Fine, then I kill you, get the key, and go for walkies.” Blood poured out, staining his shirt collar red.
“No key.” His eyes began to roll back.
“Then how do you get in and out?”
He started wheezing, a weird sound that chilled me.
Laughing. The guy was laughing .
And as soon as I realized that, I felt the hand around my throat.
I’m a big guy. Six-two, two-hundred-thirty pounds. All muscle. So when I tell you the hand on my throat was Strong , with-a-capital “S,” I hope you understand what I mean. The hand literally lifted me off the floor then tossed me back like a stick. I slammed into a window on the opposite wall, and the horizontal blinds covering the glass crashed down from their moorings and I saw what was beyond.
A river of lava. A huge, smoking, sulfurous river that burbled and boiled and looked so real that just seeing it made me feel like a marshmallow about to be s’mored. On the banks of the river were groups of men and women, lounging around on the ground and on the rocks and standing around. They were talking, laughing; a few of them leaning over from time to time to light cigarettes in the blistering heat of the lava.
Intermingled with them: demons. Tall and red, with muscled chests and cloven hooves. They had pitchforks, and I saw that some of them were in fact using them to roast marshmallows, a puffy white cylinder on the tip of each tine, bursting to flame the instant the pitchforks were extended over the lava, then reeled back to where the demon could blow on them and then hand out masses of scorched, sweet goo to other demons and to the “normal” people.
One of the normals saw me. He nearly swallowed his cigarette. Then pointed my way and said something to the demon nearest him—one with a bluish coat of hair riding up his naked back and tattoos that all involved impossibly violent sexual tableaus.
The demon jabbed another demon, got his attention. Pointed my way. By now everyone seemed to be looking at me. Blue demon finished pow-wowing with his buddy.
The buddy yelled, “We’re on, people!”
All the normals jumped as one into the lava. They started burning. Screaming. Clawing their way to the banks of the magma flow where they were shoved or prodded back into their torment by the waiting demons.
A voice at my back shouted out, “Clarence, don’t bother. Let them finish up for the day!”
The blue demon waved a Gotcha, boss! kind of wave, then said something in a weird, guttural language I didn’t understand. The demons reached in and started helping the normals out, gave each one a ShamWow to squeegee off the lingering traces of lava that still clung to them, and then everyone meandered over to a door that had appeared on the near bank of the river. They opened the door—just a door, without frame or jamb or anything—and stepped through one at a time. The door disappeared when the last person went through. All that was left was the gentle flow of the magma, with an occasional lava bubble bursting onto the burnt banks.
A familiar hand curled around my neck again and lifted me to a standing position, then swiveled me around.
The Nerd shrieked, “I did my best! I did my best!”
“I know you did,” said the voice that had told Clarence to call it a day. “You’re getting better.”
And I completed my turn. Saw the guy who was talking. A demon. The moment I saw him, the computer shrieked again, as if on cue.
This demon was goat-footed and red, with big horns. I could tell immediately that he was a whole other realm from the ones on the bank. They were “demons,” this was a Demon .
The computer shrieked. And again. “Your d-mail is getting backed up, Roald,” said the demon.
The Nerd—I guess he was Roald, which was a good, solid, nerdy name for him—moaned.
“I tried. I’m trying, please…”
“Shh,” said the demon. “You’re doing fine. You’ll get there someday.”
“He wouldn’t let me tell him what’s happening,” said Roald. “It’s his fault I’m behind.”
The demon fixed a glare on Roald and said softly, “Blaming others just adds to the number of people you’ll have to process, Roald. You’ve figured that much out, at least. When you point a finger, four point back at you, remember!”
Roald began crying.
The demon ignored him and turned back to me. Speaking softly, as if to himself, he said, “Still, I supposed giving you to”—he pointed at Roald—“him was a bit like telling a minnow to catch a great white.” He tsk-tsked .
The demon had not let me go during this exchange. The huge hand wrapped all the way around my throat ended in razor sharp claws that I could feel drawing blood as they pierced my flesh. I couldn’t breathe. Everything started to darken. I batted at the hand, but I might as well have been slapping a brick.
“Well, Mr. Vincent,” said the demon with a smile that made his canines slide out to a point well over three inches past his lips, “I must say I’m a bit disappointed. I didn’t bother with the usual spectacle,” he said, pointing at the window and the lava river beyond, “out of what I supposed you could call ‘professional courtesy.’ I didn’t think you’d need to see the faces of the damned to properly drive home where you are, and where you’re going from here. Nor did I set you for the usual group orientation. It was just you and Roald.”
The darkness was swirling fast and hard. I could barely see the demon’s face. And the face was no longer smiling.
“But you couldn’t just sit and listen, could you? And now Mr. Roald’s penance has been backed up, the actors are probably going to file a union grievance over having their break interrupted, and—worst of all—I have had to come deal with you. Which I wouldn’t mind, really, if you hadn’t been so damnably rude.”
The canines came out again. A scary look. The only saving grace was that I could barely see them. Or anything else, for that matter.
“So have it your way. You get to leave this office.”
He shook me. Once. Very, very hard. I felt my neck snap. Felt everything go numb below my upper lip. My lungs stopped working.
The darkness wound to a pinprick of light. One shining bead of saliva on the demon’s right canine. That, too, dimmed.
“Welcome to Hell, Mr. Vincent.”
Then all was black.
And then it wasn’t.
I opened my eyes, expecting to see a demon looming over me, ready to toss me in the river of lava (without benefit of union to protect my interests), or eat me alive (was I alive?), or rape me with a pitchfork.
But none of those things happened. All I saw was a ceiling. Light blue. Rays of light playing across it.
I sat up. Took in my surroundings.
I was in a bedroom. Looked like something a little kid would sleep in. Transformers on shelves, books with names like Crecheling and Fablehaven and The Schoar of Moab and Billy: Messenger of Powers sitting on a red desk by the door.
The window was open. That was where the sunlight came from. Outside I could see a nice yard, well-kept. A fence. A two-story house that looked like the kind of things suburbanites sunk way too much money into in return for the joy of living “in a nice place near the city.”
I sat there for a moment, just listening. Birds tweeted outside as the wind rushed by. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticked.
Other than that? Nothing. No sounds.
In my line of work, you get a sense for houses. Whether they’re full of good people or full of bad, whether they’re places designed for seclusion or inclusion… or whether they’re empty or full.
This one was empty. I was certain of it. Still, I moved quietly as I stood and went to the door.
And that was when I realized something was very, very wrong.
I hadn’t noticed it before, probably because my brain wasn’t equipped to process it; no point of comparison for what was happening. But when I reached for the door, I saw my hand.
And it wasn’t mine. Or rather, it was mine, but it didn’t look right. It was small and soft and pink and when it reached for the doorknob it had to reach up to do so.
I felt that hand with my other one—they were both that way—then felt my arms, my chest… my face.
I couldn’t see myself, obviously, but what I felt… It brought madness to the surface.
No longer worrying about being heard by whoever owned this place, I threw the door open. Found myself in a hall with two doors other than the one I had just left. I burst through one and saw the room I was hoping for: the bathroom. Ran to the sink, to look in the mirror, to see…
…nothing.
I saw nothing. Not because I was blind, not because the mirror had been enchanted in some strange way. No, the mirror simply wasn’t there . A line of spherical light bulbs ran in a large square, boxing in the space where a mirror should have been, but there was no silvery surface between them. Just a blank wall with a tiny sticker in the center. I leaned in close to read it, trying to keep myself from vomiting as I realized how short I was—maybe only a foot taller than the sink.
The sticker was white with elegantly scrolled black letters that said, Know Thyself.
For some reason, that sticker terrified me.
I ran through the house. It had three bathrooms, all without mirrors. Just empty space with the same sticker where a mirror should have been. In one of the bathrooms, I pulled open the drawers and found a makeup compact. I flipped it open, and where the small mirror should have been was black plastic with a sticker so tiny I could barely read it. But barely was enough.
Know Thyself.
Fear, which had already crawled into my belly and made its home there, took complete control of me.
I started screaming. My voice was higher than it should have been. The reedy pitch of a young child. And that just made me scream louder.
No one came. When I finally stopped shrieking, minutes or hours later, I could hear the birds again. But nothing else. No one else.
I wobbled to the kitchen. There was a phone on the counter by a microwave oven. I picked it up and dialed 911, all too aware of the irony of making such a call.
The phone rang once. Then picked up.
“We’re sorry,” said an androgynous voice, “all our customer care specialists are assisting others. You can wait on the line for help, and answers will be received in the order of the call. You are the”—the voice changed to a grating electronic voice—”8,745,000 to the power of 6,000,000,017”—it switched back to the androgynous voice—“caller. Please stay on the line and be patient. Or you can start to Know Thyself.”
I stared at the phone in horror. Dropped it from nerveless fingers as Kenny G started a soulful melody to keep me company as I waited.
I ran.
I don’t know how long I ran, or where I went. I only knew that I was running, running, running. My too-small legs pumped endlessly, and even though I was in what I now suspected to be the body of a five-year-old, I still covered ground.
I ran and ran, and when I stopped running, I realized I was in a city. Not suburbs, an actual city. I was next to a store that said, Cal’s Deli . On the other side of the street, a storefront read Kam and Kam, Attorneys at Law .
There was no traffic.
I realized I had seen no people during my mad flight. None at all. Not as I ran for miles in a body that should not be, and not now that I stood silent and still between two high-rises in a place that looked like New York or Chicago or maybe Philly.
I went into the deli. Before entering I stopped in front of the storefront window. For some reason the window—so clear and clean a moment ago—suddenly fogged with dirt and grime. It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years, and all I could see of my reflection was a general outline.
There was a pattern in the center of the grime. I gradually realized it was cursive writing, so elegantly placed that it seemed like art more than words. A beautiful mistake, a small miracle in the way that the dust had settled during the momentary eternity of my approach.
But there was nothing beautiful in the message.
Know Thyself.
I shivered.
Over the following days, I discovered these facts:
There was plenty of food and drink. Faucets provided clean, clear water, and wherever I went the cupboards and pantries and kitchens were well-stocked with far too much food for one person to ever hope to consume.
When I went to sleep, I awoke the next morning at precisely 5:19 a.m. I don’t know why, but that is the time that invariably showed on whatever clock was nearby. If I stayed up all night, that was fine and dandy, but the next time I fell asleep I would sleep through until the following day at 5:19 a.m.
There was electricity. There was gas. Everything I needed to heat my food, to keep warm or cool—whichever I wished in whatever house or store or office I passed my time. I would not die—if dying were even possible here—of exposure.
I had all the memories of my life, even those I wished to forget. I could call up memories of conversations, moments of anger, of love, of life, and death. All of it perfectly recalled, all of it capable of nearly transporting me to the place and time it had happened. But of this life, this new world to which I had been born… nothing. I had no idea why I was here, or what I was to do.
I couldn’t even tell what I looked like. There were no mirrors anywhere . Only myriad exhortations to Know Thyself wherever any reflection should be. There was no shiny surface that did not cloud when I approached, and somewhere in the dust or in the fog that clouded the surfaces, that same message would appear when I got close.
Once I tried looking in a koi pond and the fish went crazy as I approached, agitating the water so much that I could see nothing of my features. Several of the fish died for no discernible reason. They floated belly-up on the frothing water, and in their scales, drawn in deep blacks and vibrant oranges, that same message. An instruction to know myself hand-in-hand with the impossibility of even seeing what I looked like.
Nor could anyone tell me: I was completely alone. There was food in the pantries, there were cars in garages with keys in ignitions and enough gas to drive hundreds of miles. There were books left open on nightstands as though the owners had put them down and simply forgotten to return.
But the people themselves were gone.
For the first few days I walked silently, skulking from place to place, afraid of who I might encounter in this strange ghost-city. After a week of that, I found a silver whistle hanging on the dummy’s neck in a sporting goods store. I took the whistle and blew it every thirty seconds or so as I walked aimlessly through a metropolis that seemed to exist for no one but me.
No one ever answered the whistle. No one called. No one shadowed me as I walked.
Alone.
That lasted three months or so. A mixture of skulking and hiding and crying out for attention. At night I found whatever bed was handy and slept, and woke at 5:19 a.m. the next morning on pillowcases that had grown wet with tears shed in a dreamless sleep.
After three more months, I started trying to amuse myself. The computers worked, same as the gas and water and electricity, but when I tried to connect to the Internet, the same message always appeared: Connection Lost—Please Be Patient and Know Thyself. There went any idea of perhaps contacting someone or even sending an email. I remembered every day the screams of the “d-mails” arriving, and soon they were not pained shrieks but a welcoming chorus. They were human voices and I so longed to hear them again.
The phones all gave the same message I had heard previously. The number “in line” that I was may have changed slightly; I could never be sure. I almost wrote the number down a few times, but stopped myself. The number was so astronomically beyond my ability to fathom, that writing it down for the purpose of seeing if I had advanced in the call queue seemed an exercise in self-castigation.
There were televisions, of course—there was no place so strange or lonely or just plain wrong that you could not find the comforting company of the Idiot Box—but they all showed snow when they went on. Every channel… except channel 519 on some cable boxes. That channel showed a repeating loop of a monkey arm wrestling a kangaroo, and whenever the kangaroo won, which was always, the feed would reset and the letters KT would blink in large red letters.
I found some tablets that had e-books loaded and tried them, but whenever I hit the nineteenth word on the fifth page, the remaining text all disappeared and was replaced by LOW POWER—KNOW THYSELF.
No. Nothing fun to do, no joy to be found in anything electronic.
But the cars worked. And all of them—all of them—had gas in the tank and keys in the ignitions. I found a brand-new, spit-shined Lamborghini Huracán—probably worth a quarter million dollars—just sitting there, waiting to be driven.
In life I had always enjoyed the idea of fast, beautiful cars. It was part of what drew me to my job. Part of the appeal of the lifestyle I undertook. But I’d never been able to enjoy something this gorgeous, this smooth.
And I quickly found that I still couldn’t.
I got in the car, sunk into the luxury leather… and couldn’t even see over the dashboard. This damn body, this little child I had become was betraying one of the few things I had found in months that generated even a bit of excitement.
Still, I had time. Not much else. But plenty of time.
After a few days of searching, I found some pieces of wood and tied them to my shoes. Locating some phone books took even longer—no one uses those things anymore, apparently not even in Hell. But eventually I did find them and stacked them on the driver’s seat.
With the blocks I could reach the pedals. With the boost of the phone books I could barely see through the front windshield.
I turned on the car. It hummed like a demon—and I would know. I was in its maw, its gut, ready to willingly throw myself into its power.
“Let’s do this,” I whispered.
Bam! I slammed my right foot—or my right blocks—down on the accelerator.
The thing leaped forward so fast that I half expected to find myself hanging in midair, the car roaring away from me on its last plotted trajectory. It felt great. Fantastic. Beyond anything I expected.
And I quickly drove straight into problems.
I did all right on the straightaway, the first long run down an empty city street. Then I braked, spun the wheel right to turn down a side street. The car felt like it was super-glued to the asphalt. Not even a squeak. Just perfectly balanced gears up and down shifting, wheel suspension maintaining a near-constant level.
“Yeah!” I screamed. “Suck it, bitches!” I had no idea who the “bitches” might be—probably just screaming at Dad, who had told me I’d never succeed. Well, look at me now!
I rode the car faster, pushed it harder. Took a turn. A two-mile straight run, over a hundred-fifty miles per hour. Then another turn. Blurring my way through an empty city whose sole purpose appeared to be my existence.
This is the life.
And then I had to brake, because the street I was on ending on a T-intersection. Time to turn, right or left, right or left, right or—
What the…?
I tried to lift my foot off the accelerator. It wouldn’t come up. I tried to kick it off with my other foot. But my left foot wouldn’t move, either.
I looked down and saw instantly what had happened. The blocks and ties had slipped as I drove. The right side had turned into a tangled mass that held my foot, the blocks, and the accelerator pedal all in a bizarre Gordian knot. The left side was simpler but just as dangerous: the ties on the blocks had slipped and then looped themselves over the brake pedal. Which would have been fine were it not for the fact that some of the blocks had slipped under the brake pedal. So even with my left foot pressing as hard as I could, there was no way to stop the car.
I looked up. Saw that the Lamborghini really was fast. So fast that in the time it took to figure out the problem, any fixes I might have come up with became academic.
The car hit the curb at the end of the street. Bounced a good five feet in the air. Rising like a gorgeous, Italian-made UFO. Slamming grill-first into the stone façade of an office building.
I flew forward. My arms went up over my head. Then…
Pain.
Dark.
Nothing.
I woke up in blood. Lying across the hood of the car, which was buckled under me like a spent concertina.
I tried to push myself up. Failed. My right hand seemed to work, but my left kept slipping. Slipping. Slipping.
I finally looked at it and immediately saw why: my left arm ended a few inches above my wrist. The hand itself was nowhere to be seen, just one more piece of detritus in the ruined office space I had crashed into. I was bleeding. Bleeding fast and hard. Bleeding out, probably.
Panic gripped me, a unique terror that I had never before felt. I had faced death many times. I had caused it as well, and neither caused me to blink or to think much about them.
But I had never died in Hell.
What would happen if I did die here? Would I be “really” dead? Would I cease to exist? Would I, perhaps, leave this Hell and find myself plunged into one that was worse?
The most frightening possible answers to my questions fought with one another as I managed to roll drunkenly off the car. I came face-to-flame with fire, sheets of orange-red-white-blue dancing up the side of the Lamborghini. Contrary to the movies and television, it’s very rare for a car to explode when set on fire. Usually it just vomits out noxious fumes for a few hours, then the flames disappear.
So I wasn’t worried about becoming a crispy critter. But I was still spurting blood out of the stump of my left arm.
Don’t wanna die. Can’t die after being killed.
Don’t die!
I knew what I had to do, and knew that if I thought about it too long it would never happen.
I rammed my bleeding stump into the fire that coated the side of the car. Pushed the raw flesh of my injury against the super-heated metal beyond the flame itself.
I heard sizzling. A wet pfshh that reminded me of sausages my grandma used to make.
I felt pain. Pain like I had never known, pain so deep and white and harsh it transcended itself. It became a personage, an entity of near-flesh that melded to my own yielding skin and blood and bone.
I screamed. Screamed and screamed and even in the very depths of my pain. I couldn’t tell if the screams were of agony, or of some strange pleasure that lay beyond it.
Then I fell senseless and the darkness of oblivion claimed me.
When my eyes fluttered open, I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. There was something sticky on my face, something that crackled and pulled at my flesh. I raised my hand to brush at it, and at the same time something hit my cheek. It was soft, rounded.
My eyes were open at this point, but I wasn’t seeing. Not in any but the most technical sense. Light was entering my irises, but my brain was not making sense of the images.
The crackling sensation worsened. It felt like a bad sunburn. I tried to brush at it again, and again something blunt, soft—not entirely unpleasant-feeling—hit my face.
I blinked. It was a purposeful motion, an up-and-downing of my eyelids that I intended to wipe clean the dust that had settled over my mind. When my eyes opened this time, I began to see. Really see.
The car was beside me. Still warm from the fire that had burnt much of it to a slag of plastic and metal.
I saw my right hand. Covered in blood that had dried and congealed to a strange mass of brown-black scab. That must be the sunburn feeling: the crackle of blood caked all over my arms and chest and face. I was lucky to be alive… if that was even the right term.
I shifted my gaze to my left hand. And began to scream. Because I saw it not at the end of my arm, but lying in a pile of debris a few feet away. My left arm ended in a rounded nub, completely enclosed by skin that had grown over the stump and now—what I believed to be only a few minutes or hours after the accident—somehow had the appearance of a severe wound long-healed. Something that had happened years ago. Not minutes. Not hours. Decades .
The thing that had been hitting me in the face was my own arm, sans hand. A useless stump.
I kept screaming.
But there was no pain. Like the skin that had grown over the stump, my injuries—and I could feel that there had been many, not just the hand—were all completely healed. The only pain present was mental, not physical.
I had no hand.
I could feel my back, crooked as though it had been terribly wrenched once-upon-a-time, and never properly healed. No pain, but my motion was restricted. I could turn my waist to the right, but to the left it was stiff and unyielding.
I was the survivor of an enormous trauma that had happened only minutes ago, but somehow my body had performed years of healing in that time.
I rolled to my stomach. Pushed up on hand and stump; rose unsteadily to my feet.
I left the wrecked place, the wrecked car.
I found some food in a nearby restaurant. I was beyond hungry, I was famished . I began the laborious process of teaching myself to eat and move with one hand and much of my back’s flexibility restricted.
I was in the body of a five-year-old. Maybe six at this point. A child who had been through a lifetime of injury and the possibly greater trauma of healing. I was a wreck of physical abuse.
I was alone.
And I stayed alone. Alone through the meandering days, the mindless months, the horrifying years that passed, one after another. Walking, occasionally riding a skateboard or a bicycle for some variety (no more cars for me). Exploring countless rooms in countless buildings. Alone.
I hurt myself a few times. Badly, I mean. In my teens—that is, when my body looked like that of a teenager—I got it in my head to climb the outside of a building adorned with statues that reminded me vaguely of the demon who’d sent me here. I fell after getting less than ten feet up. Broke my leg in two places, bone sticking through the flesh of my thigh. I fainted from pain and when I woke the bone was healed, but it had never been set. I walked with a severe limp after that.
Another time I set fire to one of the high-rises. I did it right, too. Not just setting open flame to the outside of it, which would have done nothing to the ferroconcrete structure. I packed the first floor full of propane tanks I found in a warehouse a block away, hauling them one after another in a succession that probably took over a year. Then I packed the rest of the space in the first floor with flammable items: paper, chair stuffing, anything I could find. Another year’s monotony, another year of invented purpose barely staving off an abyss of madness.
When I lit the fire, I didn’t expect the first propane tank to go up quite so fast. Again, I felt pain as the flames engulfed me, then my body shut down out of self-preservation. When I woke, the fire was out, the building was still standing… but the right side of my body was covered in scar tissue, the shining white of wounds healed an impossible time in the past.
I was also naked since the fire had burned the clothes right off my skin. But I didn’t bother getting dressed. Why should I? What were clothes to me here, now?
I was, I estimated, about sixty years old at this point. My body, that is. I had no idea how old I really was, or if that kind of thing even mattered.
What was age in Hell? What were years without human experience; without the wisdom that came from change?
I limped my way through days and decades. Alone, lost in a city that had become my world. Seventy years old. Eighty.
I tried to leave the city more than once. To find my way back to the suburban neighborhood where I had first awoken. I never could. The city stretched out for an infinity—or so near to one that it made no difference. I spent two years walking in a straight line and when I went out on the top of the nearest high-rise, I could only see buildings stretching forever in every direction.
Nothing ever changed. There was no dust, no sense of rot or malaise in anything but me. The food never spoiled; there was no inclement weather. Every day was sunny, every night was clear and utterly starless. There was nothing to change the monotony, nothing to give any sense of the passage of time, other than a pad I carried around to mark passing days.
I think I was about eighty-five when I died. I could be wrong. There was a long period in my seventies when I went more than a little mad. I don’t remember much of it, and it’s very hard to keep track of time when you’re barking at the moon and frantically trying to have sex with a life-sized teddy bear you found in a toy store so as to create a new master race of creatures blessed with the mind of a man and the stuffing of a plush toy.
Yeah, not my best moment.
Still, I was fairly certain I was around eighty-five the day I finally died… again.
I was on a bed I’d found to pass the night. Woke up to the singing of a bird outside somewhere. I had never seen a bird, never seen anything alive in this place but me, but I did hear the chirps from time to time and they were like a gift.
I got up slowly. Joints creaking with age, skin tight with scar tissue, old injuries keeping me from moving with any fluidity or speed.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
My chest hurt.
I grabbed it with my good hand, my remaining hand.
Then I fell forward. I felt my heart stuttering. K-dub, lub-d-dub.
I died.
And I died smiling. Thinking with my last strength: At last .
My eyes opened.
I looked around. I was in the same bed where I had died. And I knew that I had died. There was something deep in me that said this was my second go-round on the mad, monotonous Tilt-A-Whirl that my life or afterlife had become.
I was dead… again .
Alive… once more .
I rolled over. And in doing so I realized that I was moving with ease. Moving without the lingering numbness of mangled nerves, the stiffness of bones healed at wrong angles. I smiled. Held up my left arm, looking for a hand I somehow knew would be there once more, perfectly restored.
I was right. So right. More right than I counted on. That’s why I started screaming. Shrieking for so long that my world became only the sound of agony and despair.
My hand was back. Perfect. Pink.
Young.
I had died after nearly a century of wandering alone. And the next morning I awakened in my five-year-old body again. Staring at a freckle on a hand I hadn’t had in ninety years, and no joy from seeing it because that freckle was on a hand so small and young that I knew I was doomed to continue playing this most awful game. Go Directly to Young, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200 . Just one more spin through a worthless, monotonous, pointless life.
Or whatever this was. Can it still be life after you’ve died twice?
I sat up.
Stood up.
Left the room.
Walked the city.
Lived a life—
Or something horribly like it.
This time I didn’t last as long. Nowhere near the ninetyish years of my first go-round. When I woke up on the first day of my second (after)life I couldn’t find the pad I’d been using to mark off days, and I honestly forgot about it for a few months. But then I started keeping track again, and so I knew I was in my forty-sixth year for the second time.
I was on the fifty-second floor of a high-rise. I’d found a really nice boardroom and decided to become president and CEO of a new company. I was lecturing the empty seats, outlining our mission statement, when I heard birdsong.
As before, the birds were nowhere to be seen, but the thought seized me that if only I found the right vantage point, I might actually find them. I excused myself from the meeting—being the president and CEO comes with its privileges—then threw a chair out the window and climbed out onto the narrow ledge that surrounded the building.
The birds had to be out here. Had to be somewhere close. I could hear them. Could hear their songs.
I slipped without seeing them.
Wondered how badly I would be crippled when I woke up from my fall.
But apparently the rules were different for injuries that were fatal in and of themselves. I hit the ground. I survived long enough to hear the low click-tik-ti-click of my teeth raining down on the sidewalk all around me after bouncing right out of my head. Then I died.
I woke up the next morning on the sidewalk.
Young again.
I didn’t scream this time. Being my third “birth” day in this strange place, I finally realized that I was doomed to live and die forever here. So no screams. I just ran. Ran. Ran. Tried to get out of the city, to retrace my steps to where I had started, the place beyond the limits of the city. The little boy’s room. I belonged there. I shouldn’t have left.
I never found my way out of the city. Of course not. The city was all there was now. The only life I had, the only world I would know. But I ran so hard my heart burst in my chest. I died.
I awoke. I lived. Died. Lived.
So many, many times.
Nothing ever went bad. Nothing ever spoiled. Nothing ever died but me —and then I would wake up the next morning in whatever place I died the day before, and the whole thing started over.
I lived a hundred times. Then a thousand. Ten thousand.
When I was thirty-five—iteration: 11,659—I thought I sensed something different. I felt watched. I stopped what I was doing (arguing with the invisible man who sold me the lawn chair I’d been carrying with me for the last seven years), and looked around. The city was, as always, my only company.
But I realized that the birds had been chirping a moment ago. And now… silence. As though something—
Some one, please, whoever is in charge of this, please let it be some one.
—had frightened them to silence.
I stayed there the entire day. Didn’t move once. Not even when I had to void my bladder and bowels. I just let loose where I stood, hoping that if I remained silent and still I might see whatever—
Whoever !
—was out there.
Sometime in the evening, the birds began to chirp again. Sadness gripped me. Despair so powerful that I did the only reasonable thing: I ran to the nearest open door, which led to the office of a tax preparation firm. I found a pencil and rammed it through my throat, twisting so that I would tear out carotids and jugular in one ecstatic motion.
I woke up the next morning. Age five; iteration: 11,660.
I nearly despaired. For the millionth time in my ten thousand lives, I nearly lost control.
But something stopped me. Because this time, for the first time, when I woke there was something different .
It wasn’t much, but it was everything. Just a small piece of paper, but it was a piece of paper that signaled change .
Or perhaps not. Perhaps this was just one more spiral, a ring concentric to the ones in which I had been spinning for a near-eternity. Because though the paper was new to this place, it was definitely one that I had seen before. At least, I’d seen its type before.
The paper was folded across my young chest, my new five-year-old hands clasped over it when I came out of my most recent death and into my newest life. A simple white sheet, folded down the middle.
I unfolded it with hands that were too small for the task to come. Too weak for what must happen soon.
When I was alive—really alive, in a place before this unchanging stream of events that did not matter, in a place where others lived and walked with me, I had seen these papers. They were my vocation, my lifestyle… and ultimately they led to my death.
The paper I found in my hands contained the same information these papers always held. In life, the real one that is, they had been delivered to a dead drop—a trash can, or a P.O. Box with a dummy owner—not tucked in my grasp as I slept. But as in life, this page had only three things:
A location.
A time.
A picture.
I skipped over the first two, moving to the printed photo. The paper darkened in perfect circles as tears fell from my cheeks and wet it.
This was the first face I had seen in many hundreds of thousands of years. There was no way to view my own image—no reflections, only exhortations to Know Thyself —and after a few years I realized that there were no other images of people, either. Books I found had missing spaces where pictures had once been. Every photo frame I saw held only blank paper in its boundaries. Even Chef Boyardee had been scrupulously wiped away from every can of Spaghetti-Os I found in one pantry.
So this face… this stranger’s face on the paper, it was worth more than any treasure I had ever held. It was grainy, low resolution. But it was a face . The face of a middle-aged man, nondescript save a shock of white hair that ran the length of his scalp.
I finally looked away from the face. Stared at the time and place stated. The place was one I knew, a street only a few miles away from where I happened to be. The time listed: 6:00 p.m.
I looked for a clock. I was still in the tax preparation office—as always, I seemed to have been reborn the next day in the very place I had died—so finding one wasn’t hard. Several wall clocks, a few desk clocks. I had stopped paying attention to clocks many millennia ago, but now I checked the time once more. Checked to see if I would be able to get to the location in time.
Whenever I slept, I would wake up at 5:19 a.m. the next morning, with no exceptions and no deviations. But when I woke up the day after dying, I might wake up at any time, from very early morning to late afternoon.
This time I had awakened at noon. Plenty of time to get where I needed to go.
I started walking.
Soon I was skipping . Because this wasn’t just something new. This paper wasn’t merely a new twist in the Mobius strip of my existence. No, this was a way out . I knew it was, knew it represented the end of my time in Hell. I had somehow earned my way out of this place.
If I did just one more thing; if I followed the protocols I had set up and followed so stringently in life.
I forced myself to stop skipping. Because how ridiculous would it be to trip and fall? To die on the way to my final test, or even simply to break a bone and miss the appointment?
No. Care. Care was the watchword.
I walked. Then I slowed still further. Eventually I was crawling, hands and knees coming down with painstaking attention to where each hand touched, what centimeters I would move with each passing moment.
I had to get there. But it was close. I had time.
I crawled. My small hands and knees ached. My flesh was new, so there were no calluses to protect it, and soon I was leaving a trail of bloody handprints as I went. Tiny, red palms and outspread fingers gripping each passing bit of the sidewalk, pulling it toward me, pulling myself toward my destination.
It hurt. The pain was glorious. It was, I knew, the pain of final birth. The pain that would lead me to the end of this place.
It was five o’clock before I reached my destination. I forced myself to stand because there were preparations that had to be made. I had thought of nothing else on the way here. Just what had to be done. Just the final test before leaving Hell.
One hour to go. I had put the paper that brought me here in a pocket, and now I took it out and looked at it. I touched the face, the first and only face I had seen in my long time here. I smiled, and I kissed it.
Then I heard a sound. I spun and saw someone approaching. It was 5:00 p.m., so the city was in twilight. Lights would not turn on after the sun went down, so every time night fell the darkness was complete. Now the dark fingers of night were clenching in on themselves, a fist that would hold all in its grasp in only a few moments.
I dove behind a sandwich board sign that advertised free drinks with a dinner entrée. Huddled quietly. Cursed myself for a fool. Of course the paper had said where the man would be, and that he would be there at six. But it hadn’t said he would arrive at that time… there was nothing that said he couldn’t get there early and simply wait.
My preparations were moot. Now I had only my own knowledge, my own experience.
I could hear him approaching. He was mumbling under his breath. He sounded drunk.
I looked around. The darkness continued to deepen, which made it hard to see anything useful. The only thing I could make out was a car—a Honda, battered and tired-looking—at the curb a few feet from me.
I hadn’t driven a car since the disastrous Lamborghini event, and I didn’t have any intentions of driving this one. But it might be helpful, nonetheless.
I waited until I heard the mumbles drop off a bit. Hoping that meant the man was moving away, or at least had his head turned. I slipped across the sidewalk, easing the car door open and crawling inside. The sound the car door made as it unlatched and then opened were louder than thunder to my ears, but the other man’s sounds continued unabated so he must not have heard anything.
I slid across the seats. Sat behind the wheel.
The keys were in the ignition, as they always were. I had tried for an entire lifetime to figure out why the keys were always ready, the cars always gassed, but had come up with nothing. It was just one more bit of un sense in a world created to mock rationality.
But now I understood. The keys were in the ignitions in preparation for this single moment. For this time when they would be needed—not merely to drive a car, but for something far more important.
I slid the key out of the ignition. Just a bit of metal coated with plastic at one end. Nearly no weight to it. But it felt like Excalibur in my hand. This was the moment I had spent the better part of eternity waiting for.
I rolled down the window. Slowly. Silently. The Honda didn’t have power windows, so it was one quiet crank after another, dropping the window a millimeter at a time until there was nothing between me and the night.
And it was night. Dark had fallen. The final starless sky I would see in this place. I was leaving.
I could hear the other man’s mumbling. Low, but with the bouncing tones of an inebriate or a madman. Someone speaking to people who were not there and never had been.
I sat. I waited.
The words started to drift into the windless night, and for a moment I worried that he was leaving. That would make things harder.
Then the volume increased. He was coming closer.
I slunk down in my seat. Lower, then lower still. I could only make out a single sliver of black night through the side window, and could not see over the dash at all. I was in a cocoon. Waiting to come out as a new creature, a thing finally Alive.
The sounds came closer. Closer.
Something darkened my view of the sky. I saw a strip of white—that shock of hair, so out of place on his head—then nothing. He passed.
I sat up. He was outside the car, his back to me.
I leaned through the open window, eschewing the use of the door to exit. But once I was almost completely out of the car, I didn’t drop to the ground. Instead I levered myself up until I was standing on the roof. At the last second my weight caused the cheap metal to buckle slightly.
The man stopped mumbling.
He turned.
I saw his eyes widen. That was perfect.
I jumped off the roof. Left arm outstretched to catch him. To hang from him.
My right hand held the Honda key. I buried it in his eye.
The man went rigid beneath me. He shuddered. Then he vomited, his body reacting to what had just happened. Sticky warmth covered me from neck to belly.
I let go of the key and it remained fastened in place, sticking out of his ruined eye socket. I slammed it with my bloody palm. Drove it another quarter-inch. Then hit it again. Again.
He shuddered. Tried to vomit once more. Then simply went rigid and toppled to the side. I rode him down, and before he hit the sidewalk I tore his throat out with my teeth.
A new, different kind of warmth covered me. But where before the man’s vomit had seemed disgusting and foul, his blood was sensuous, lovely. It was the blood of birth, of re birth, of baptism into new and real Life.
At the last second, the man’s body twitched. Spun. I was no longer on him, but rather under him. His body weight slammed down on me, driving me into the sidewalk as well. I hit my head against unyielding cement. The dark night seemed to flow into my mind. To take over my world.
I smiled.
I was free.
I woke up the next morning and knew it was 5:19 a.m.
I could hear birds singing.
I did not open my eyes. I wanted to relish this moment. I knew things were going to be different. That they were going to be better.
I had fulfilled my contract.
That was what I did in life. That was how I got here in the first place: a botched hit that ended with me getting the bullet instead of my target. And so it made sense that to get out of Hell I had to complete a final contract. Had to finish a job to balance out what had been left undone in my life.
A hitman doesn’t have the luxury of “what-ifs.” There is only the job, and it is either completed successfully, or it is a failure. Successful jobs lead to more work, more folded pages in dead drops known only to a handful of underworld contacts. More money, more power.
Failed jobs lead to loss of earnings, loss of prestige, and—eventually and inevitably—loss of life.
The last job I’d taken had looked fine. Checked out from start to near-finish, to the ultimate moment where instead of getting the drop on my target he somehow pulled a gun and shot me. Even after all these thousands of years I can remember how shocked I was how fast he was. Just a single shot, a small bullet was all it took to end the life of probably the most-sought-after contractor in the United States.
So when I saw the paper in my hands, I knew I had to make up for my mistake. Had to finish something left undone: a final, open job.
Job closed. Job done.
Now what?
I still hadn’t opened my eyes. But something new had seeped into my consciousness. A thing that I had felt since the first instant, but had either ignored or simply had been unwilling to accept.
Something heavy. Something on me.
I opened my eyes.
The man I’d killed was still there. Lying on top of me, lifeblood dried on both of our clothes like the world’s most horrific tie-dye. My body was still that of a five-year-old. I hadn’t accomplished anything, anything, anything. Nothing!
I started screaming. My voice was high, youthful. The shriek of a child; one burdened by untold lifetimes of madness, experience, horror.
I screamed and did not stop screaming. I fell senseless, and when the fog lifted I was still screaming under the body of the man I’d killed.
The birds had stopped chirping. Listening reverently to a song they could never hope to replicate.
Something moved. I kept screaming.
I thought at first the movement was my own: my overloaded mind—
How many lifetimes can one mind hold?
—starting to short out and cause my muscles to contract and relax without my conscious intervention.
Then realization penetrated my panic: the motion was not me.
Something pulled the weight off me. Yanked the dead man off my tiny frame.
I looked and saw the last thing I expected: another human face.
It belonged to a teenager. A kid with bright red hair, the peach fuzz of someone who didn’t quite need regular shaving on his chin.
He shook his head. “Sorry, kid,” he said.
I didn’t understand that, but there was something so confusing about the sorrow—
Madness
—in his eyes that I stopped screaming.
I realized—too late—that he was holding something in his hand. A folded sheet of paper.
I stood, jumped up so fast I actually managed to run. But of course he caught me. Only a few blocks away, he tackled me and I fell beneath him and then I drew in a breath. Perhaps to scream, perhaps to plead against what was coming, perhaps to laugh the mad cackle of hopelessness realized, but never had a chance to complete the motion.
“Sorry,” he said again. Then he slammed a hammer down on my face.
The last thing I saw was that paper in his hand, a picture of a child barely visible on it.
Is that what I look like?
I blinked, then squinted, then opened my eyes.
Awake again.
Not even murder could kill me.
I was lying only blocks away from the place I had killed a man, splayed on the sidewalk where someone else had killed me .
But I was alive again. Alive and small and still spinning my wheels through the unending course of a futile existence.
I wept.
Eventually, I got up. It is a sad fact of human existence that we cannot just lay back and accept our lots. We fight against our circumstances, we fight against fate, we struggle even against the inevitable reality of our death. And now I fought against the knowledge that I was doomed to stay here forever. Against the truth that no matter what I did, I would remain in this place for eternity.
I walked, I ran. I ate, I drank, and I voided my bladder and evacuated my bowels. My body aged and grew and if I damaged it too badly or lived long enough it gave out and I woke up anew.
After another thousand lifetimes I woke up holding another folded paper. I crumpled it and threw it away, but every time I looked at my hand I found it had somehow appeared there again. A new job, to be done whether I liked it or not.
I refused. I walked in the opposite direction, intent on avoiding yet another useless interaction. Who the people were that I should kill, I did not know. Nor did I care, just as I didn’t care about the boy who killed me . It simply was , just as my existence here was . There was no meaning, only the simple, undefined truth of existence. To think otherwise was to hold out agonizing, useless hope.
So I walked away from the place where there would be another man to kill. Why bother?
And then I discovered something new in this empty world.
Pain.
I remembered the pain of cauterizing the bloody stump of my arm after that first car crash so many lifetimes past. The pains of a million falls, a million lacerations and bruises and broken bones. None of them compared to the agony that drove me to my knees at this moment. I opened my mouth and vomited blood. Speckles of red fell to the street below my hands and I realized I was sweating blood… an agony so utter and intense that it was causing the capillaries to burst within my flesh.
I moaned. Swayed.
And as I did, I realized that when I swayed to the right the pain lessened. I slumped that way. The pain was slightly less intense. Not much… it was like taking a teacup out of the ocean, but anything was welcome.
I pulled myself that way. Inch by pain-ridden inch. No longer even capable of moaning.
Every movement in that direction brought a lessening of the pain. Every moment I stayed where I was, the agony intensified. I crawled.
Eventually I was able to stand again. To walk.
And realized I was moving toward the place specified on the paper I had been given; the paper that I once more held in my bloody hands.
It seemed that there was more to this existence than simple wandering. I was given contracts. And they could not be denied.
When I got to the designated location, there was an old, old man there. He was curled up at the base of a tree planted in a break in the sidewalk. He looked up at me as I leaned down to him, to break his neck and so end my pain.
He whispered something. I leaned in to hear it.
“Goodbye,” he said.
And I felt the knife stab me in the stomach. Heard him cackle.
Saw the paper he held.
Then the dark came, then the light and the unseen chirping birds, and I was young and held another paper with another name and knew that things had changed, and not for the better. How could they? This was, after all, Hell.
So many lifetimes. Iteration: 1,220,447
Sometimes I lived long and alone, nothing to do and nowhere to go. Others I was given a single job when a teen or a man in his twenties, others I got a new job every day and suffered agony until each was filled.
Sometimes I killed them. Other times I was the one murdered.
Nothing new. Nothing new. Nothing new…
Madness was my only refuge. But even that was all-too-often stolen by those white pages with unknown faces, by the choice of murder or pain.
The world was still sterile, still void of meaning. I could not see who I was, still could not see any faces but those on the pages, those I was to hunt. But there were changes. The birds no longer sang. There was only silence in the sky.
And the world was filling up.
Where I had spent eons alone, now I sensed more and more people. Never directly—the only people I ever saw directly were those I hunted, or those who hunted me—but I often felt watched. I often detected presences nearby, more of them as the years passed.
And one day I got a paper with an old man on it. Nothing new there; I had killed innumerable men and boys, age was of no matter to me. I walked to the place, bringing a Molotov cocktail I’d made for the meeting.
He was there, holding a piece of paper as well. He didn’t see me, but I assumed that he was looking for me, so I lit the cocktail and prepared to fling it.
I drew back my arm. It would be fun to see him burn. A bright star of difference in the infinite night of sameness that was my existence.
He turned, and as he did I noted two things:
First, he wasn’t holding a paper. It was a pad . And it was one that I vaguely felt I should recognize.
Second, he was holding it in his hand. His only hand. The other ended at the wrist. A stump, long-healed. Skin slick with burn-scars, a pinch to his back that indicated badly-healed injuries.
The pad, I realized, counted the days of an existence. A hash-mark to note each one of the first days of an eternity.
Me . It’s me. The first me.
The Molotov fell from my fingers. The bottle broke at my feet. I barely felt the pain or my own death.
Iteration: 1,220,448.
I woke on the pavement. Facing the early-morning sky. 5:19 a.m.
Only now I knew that the sky I was seeing wasn’t the next , it was the first .
Always I had assumed that when I died I simply woke the next morning. But what I had seen yesterday—
No, not yesterday, it was many tomorrows from now .
—had finally made me understand. When I died, I woke up in the morning—the morning, the first morning. The clock was reset, and I took my place in the world. But the Me that was did not disappear; rather I existed as a new copy of Myself. An iteration of my life that existed simultaneously with all the other version of “Me” born through the years. Each time I died, I woke the first morning as a new copy. And eventually, over a million-plus iterations, I had begun to fill up this great city in Hell. The feeling of being watched? Of someone nearby? That was my own sense of Myself.
I had never seen a woman, I realized. Just men, boys.
Just me.
Something crinkled in my hand. A paper. I looked at the face printed on it and wondered how I could have failed to recognize myself. But of course, I hadn’t seen myself in ages. And even if I had… the selves had different experiences, different pains that carved different wrinkles on each face.
Here, in Hell, I was every possible Me, and none of them were recognizable to the others.
Until now.
I ran to the place on the page. Knowing what it all meant, knowing what I was to do.
I ran, knowing that the Me I found would be waiting with his own page, his own instructions, his own insane drive to kill.
I would have to save the man—or boy—I found. I would have to convince him not to kill me, and I would have to convince him then to save others.
Know Thyself.
I knew what I was. I was a killer, a murderer, a madman, a fiend.
I would have to show that truth to the other selves, and somehow would have to convince them not to do this. Not to kill. To seek out the names on the papers not to murder them, but to teach them and save them.
The way out of Hell was not killing. It was saving . I had finally come to know myself. Now I was beholden to save my many selves, to stop them from killing. I was driven not to destroy them, but to teach them. To teach all the infinite copies of “Me” a better way. A purpose that did not involve setting myself above others, but bringing them to selfless service.
How long? How long will I have to do this?
And the answer to that was obvious now, as well: as long as it took. Not just to save this Me, but to save all my selves.
Each time I killed Me, another was born. And each one must be saved, each one must be brought to understand what the true meaning of the pages was.
They were not contracts to kill, they were a means of looking at past deeds so that I could stop the chain of murder and mayhem. So that I could be reborn—not just this Me, but all possible permutations of myself.
To get out of Hell, I would have to heal the scar I had created on the face of existence. And to do that I would have to outpace my own murderous intentions, my sociopathic focus on self.
I ran to the place where I would be waiting for Me. Where I knew I would try to kill Me.
I ran, and for the first time I felt hope. Not because I thought I could accomplish what must be done, but because I was, for the first time, moving in the right direction.
I ran to meet myself in Hell and smiled on my way to doom and salvation.