fall asleep during this one. Who knows how long I snooze through it, and when I wake up, I feel just like I always do—tired. And there’s never any change in the light, so how am I supposed to know how long I’ve been out, how many cycles through this same piece I’ve been listening to for all eternity?

No, not the same piece. And not all eternity.

But mostly the same piece, and for a very, very long time.

The devil was one smoking hot number. This was only one of the reasons I didn’t believe in her. Or believe her.

As when she said, “You’re going to be in here for a long, long time.”

Behind her hulked another devil. Bigger, and ugly. He held a feather quill over a clipboard and watched the good-looking one closely.

“Sweetheart,” I said, looking up and down at the devil girl’s red flesh, rippling like juicy sashimi in all the right places, “I’m going to be in here until I sleep it off. Hopefully I’ll remember you, and think of you fondly when I’m alone.”

“You’re one of the delusional ones,” she said. “You don’t believe you’re going to Hell.”

“I’m probably going to Hell, all right.” I remember that I smirked, but that’s no great insight. I smirk a lot. “But this isn’t Hell.” I gestured around me at the dark walls, the jets of fire visible through the windows. “This is a stereotype, brought on by reading too many bad stories and being stoned. Hell, this is a cliché.”

The big, scary guy behind the cutie arched an eyebrow at me. “Hell,” he said. “Whether it is a cliché or not, is rather beside the point.”

Even after I wake up, it takes me a while to spot it. You’d think I’d be super-sensitive by now, but I’m not. The first movement, only it’s not really a first movement, it’s more like a second movement, because it’s always adagio and the first movement of a symphony is supposed to be allegro . Hell is slow. I joked about this, at first, asked for something a little faster, something with a backbeat.

It isn’t a joke anymore. Hell is church music, of the most solemn, droning, dirge-like kind. A-mighty-fortress-is-this-Hell.

I’d kill for a little Buddy Holly.

There goes the first movement, and then the second. And they’re identical. And then the first, and the second, and they still sound identical. Only I know they’re not. I know, from experience, and because this is what she told me during the intake interview, that the first and second movement are not identical. The first again, and the second, first, second, first, second.

There it is.

It’s just a little rest.

I call it. “Measure… uh, thirty-nine,” I say. “There’s a… sixteenth-note rest at the end of the measure in the second movement.”

The conductor is a burly scale-covered green beast, with jaws like an alligator’s, only as big again as its entire body. It looks down its snout at me through half-moon glasses and tut-tuts, shaking its head.

“No,” the conductor growls. “The Giver of All Things invites you to try again.”

“Damn.” The joke wasn’t funny the first time I said it, but I keep saying it anyway.

The conductor raises its baton, a thin sliver of ivory. The choir opens its many mouths and howls again.

The first time I saw the choir, I jumped.

It was right after the interview with Red Sonja (as I liked to think of her), and apparently close by. She’d pointed, and a pair of short, stocky, red-skinned guys poked me with sharp sticks until I walked the way they wanted, which was through a curtain and down narrow, winding stairs.

“This is a bad trip,” I said to them.

It was a pun, just not a very good one. And then they poked me through another curtain, which—I swear—was made of human finger bones, and knotted in long twine made of human hair. And as I walked through it, the bones whistled, all together, each a different note, none of them adding up to harmony.

“And getting worse,” I muttered.

And then I saw the choir.

They were all girls. I recognized them at once, because I’d seen them before. They had all been in one of my choirs. They were all pretty enough, and a few of them were knockouts. Some of them I knew I’d gotten stoned with. Some of them I’d… well, let’s just say I’d seen more of them than a high school teacher is supposed to see.

Yeah, that’s a smirk.

But my first reaction wasn’t a smirk. My first reaction was to jump. Surprise, you know? But then I remembered.

“See, I’m just stoned,” I said to the two red pokey-guys.

Only they were gone. And so was the finger bone-flutes curtain, and the whole hallway I’d come through. Blank wall.

“Stoned.”

“Ahem.”

“Measure thirty-nine,” I say, but I get it right this time. “There’s a thirty-second note rest at the end of the thirty-ninth measure of the second movement that isn’t there in the first movement.”

The conductor nods and turns back to the choir.

The choir starts singing again, the same wordless howling damned two-movement symphony. Not quite the same—from long, long experience, I know that the first movement of this “new” piece will be identical to the second movement of the prior piece, and the second movement of the new piece will differ from the first movement in one particular. So it goes, as I roll from one nearly identical piece to another through a series of tiny, particular changes.

Sometimes, the particular is huge, and noticeable. I remember once—and I have no way to tell you how long ago this was, because I cannot measure time here—the second movement was in seven-eighths time. The first was in four-four, and that’s a huge difference. For you non-music types, that’s this:

First Movement: BUM-bum-bum-bum-BUM-bum-bum-bum

Second Movement: BUM-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-BUM

Tapped out like that, you’re hearing it and you think, Huh, they don’t sound so different . But trust me, they’re night and day. Most of the music you hear on the radio is four-four or maybe three-four, if it sounds like you could waltz to it. Seven eighths is rare. And strange. And to have all the same notes shoved from four-four into seven eighths was… completely discombobulating. All the emphases shifted. It was like suddenly hearing the Gettysburg Address, with Lincoln stressing the last line of every syllable: “Four score and se-ven years a-go , our ance-stors brought forth on this conti-nent …” you get the picture. It was right, but totally wrong.

So I spotted that change right away. But then the next piece was in seven eighths, and the next, and the next… for a long, long time. Seven eighths began to feel normal, but normal in a horrible way. When I stood to stretch my legs or get a drink from the fountain in the corner, I staggered like a drunk man from the time signature.

The eventual shift back to four-four was rain in the Sahara. Of course, by then the piece had completely changed.

The conductor looks at me. It’s hard to say the expression is quizzical , since the conductor has a quivering membrane that looks like a metronome in each eye socket instead of eyes, but it’s asking me a question.

“The Infinitely Patient inquires if you have discerned the difference between these two movements.”

I shrug.

The choir resumes again, at measure one.

“You have a few things to learn,” Red Sonja said. This was before she had me prodded away from her desk. I only ever saw her the once.

“Okay.” Smirk.

“The Lord Ahura Mazda, Worthy of Worship, is open-handed and liberal of heart, of course. He wishes to give you every advantage.”

Behind her, the big guy nodded solemnly.

“Is this where you offer me a doobie?”

Red Sonja frowned.

“Drugs,” I said. “Is the Lord Mazda Miata holding?”

“You are not here for drugs,” she said. “Nor will drugs be given to you. Nor should you want them. The Root of Creation gives you an opportunity to heal, and a test. You had best be sober.”

“How long?” I asked. I could do sober, but I preferred it in short stints. Say, from seven in the morning until noon.

“That’s really up to you.” Red Sonja squinted at me. “But I’d guess at least a billion years.”

I liked to watch the choir, at first. The singers are all women, young, and good-looking. And like I said, I know them.

So for a while, I watched them. That gets frustrating, just watching, so once, early on, I tried to approach. I figured, hey, a little cuddle in between movements. A quick feel, you know? No harm, no foul. I’d given out many A’s to students willing to relieve my boredom. It was practically a scholarship program.

That was when I discovered that the conductor does more than just wave a baton in the right time signature. Those giant alligator jaws just about snapped me in half, and the monster let out a roar that shook the chamber.

I scampered back to my seat, breathing pretty hard, and haven’t tried that again.

Hell is look, but don’t touch.

That’s frustrating. You know what I mean.

Especially because, and I wouldn’t swear to this, I think the girls might change, too. Over time, I mean. Like the movements do. Like maybe one of the girls gets taller over time, or curvier, or whatever.

The Endless Bliss does that to torment me, I think. Keep me frustrated.

This is Hell, after all.

I sit on a chair, red velvet rubbed shiny like an old theater seat. It’s comfortable enough for dozing, and I’ve spent years asleep in it. Red curtains hang down the walls, and the ceiling is hidden in darkness somewhere above me. The stage is a low platform large enough to accommodate the choir and the conductor.

In the corner, there’s a fountain, like I said. And a tree. I don’t pay much attention to them, because they’re a fountain and a tree, and once I’ve taken that in, there’s nothing more to do. The tree grows fruit. I don’t know what kind of fruit it is, a persimmon or a passion fruit or something I never ate before I came here.

But now I eat it. I eat the fruit, I drink water from the fountain, I pace around the room, I look at the girls. When I spot the variation between the first and second measures of a piece, I call it out to the conductor. The music changes.

I don’t know what Red Sonja thought I was supposed to learn from this. Or what the test is.

Maybe it’s a bad trip, after all.

Only two things different ever happened, in all the years I’ve been here.

Okay, years is a guess, but it’s true that once I kept track of the number of pieces of music I heard. I don’t have anything to write with, or even to scratch in the walls, so I just counted in my head. Wake, sleep, spot musical variations, wake, sleep, and so on, until I lost my count, somewhere around seventeen thousand.

I didn’t try counting again. But I’m pretty sure that makes years.

The first thing was a face.

I’d been listening to the back and forth of two movements and zoning in and out, as I sometimes do, when I realized there was a face poking out from between two of the curtains. I was surprised, but I managed to play it cool. I pretended I didn’t notice the face, but studied it out of the corner of my eye.

The face was a man’s face. It was bearded and dirty, with long, ragged hair, and its eyes were open so wide I thought at first it must be dead.

I mean dead-dead, corpse-dead, not dead-but-doing-stuff-in-Hell. You get me.

But then the face licked its lips.

I had come through the curtains, so I knew doors could exist behind them. I also knew, from having looked behind the curtains, oh, thousands of times, that there were almost never such doors. But the face made me wonder.

So I looked away, yawned, stretched, and then walked as if I was going to get a drink.

But at the point of my stroll nearest the face, I leaped sideways, pounced like cat on the face—

But came up with nothing. Fists full of empty curtain. The face was gone.

And of course, no doors.

What in Hell? I thought.

That made me laugh. I laughed for a long time.

The second thing that ever happened was a man. A full body, this time.

I woke up from dozing to hear a series of leaping arpeggios over a low drone and then an octave-high jump to a flatted tone. And there was a man, sitting on the edge of the stage and looking at me. He wore nothing special, jeans and a polo shirt, but he stared at me with wild eyes.

The conductor and the choir both seemed to be ignoring him.

It took me a few seconds to think of what to ask first.

“Where’d you come from?” Is what I settled on.

He pointed a finger up.

I scratched my head. “Heaven?”

“No,” he said. “I came down the curtains.”

I squinted up into the darkness. “What, there’s a door up there?”

He said nothing.

“Did the Awakener of Eternal Spring send you?”

Still no answer.

“So, look,” I tried, “you’re the first new thing I’ve seen here in, oh, I don’t know, a bazillion years.”

“Maybe not a bazillion.”

I smirked. “Maybe not. But a long time. So… tell me something. If you got in here, there’s a way in. So there has to be a way out, doesn’t there?”

His face betrayed nothing. “Unless the way out just goes to where I came from.”

“Where did you come from?” I asked him. “Was it like this?”

He looked around, examined the choir and the conductor. “No. There was an art show. Nudes. And before that, flowers. Before that, authors. It was a reading, they sat around reading their short stories to each other.”

“Forgiver of Sins!” I cursed. “That must have been Hell indeed.”

He nodded. “You have a tree.”

“Yep.” I pointed at it. “Help yourself.”

He plucked a piece of fruit, looked up at the higher branches. The tree is a tallish one. “They all have trees.”

“Guess you gotta eat, even in Hell.” I smirked. “Who knew?”

He pointed. “The fruit at the top of the tree… does it look different to you?”

I shrugged. “Fruit. Hard to care much.”

He then lay on the floor and fell asleep, which pretty much ended the conversation. I dozed off myself, and when I woke up, he was gone.

“A key change,” I tell the conductor. “That’s not even subtle, I don’t know how I missed it. What? A to E, I think.”

The conductor nods and turns back to the choir to start again.

Later, I tried to climb the curtains. I thought maybe I could find where that guy came from, or maybe I could get back to Red Sonja’s desk and demand an explanation.

It felt like I was getting up there pretty high, but every time I looked down, I saw the choir right below my feet. I never could see the ceiling, either. Just darkness.

Eventually, I gave up.

So here I am.

Sleep. Wake. Listen, spot differences, look at the girls. Get a drink of water and eat low-hanging fruit when I need to.

Repeat.

No more staring faces, not since the one. No more mysterious men in polo shirts who want to talk about trees.

I don’t know what the hell Red Sonja was talking about. If you’ll forgive the pun.

I’m not learning anything.