Jim roams that night, unable to sleep, never able to sleep. Exhausted, feeling so heavy after several hours lying in bed, but some switch will never turn off. He’s outside in the cold wet night air and still can’t wake fully, lost in some half land, a taste of what purgatory will be, dark and cold and trackless and steep with the moon gone and shadows above. He descends, because this is easiest and where we’re inevitably drawn, and he would like to lie down but he knows how many scorpions are here, hidden in all the deadfall. Purgatory vast, unlimited, no hordes of broken souls but each soul alone and afraid to rest because of all the small demons waiting. And what is the purpose, of purgatory or of this night? Is he supposed to be somehow made no longer himself?
All the surface loose. He can kick and send it spraying. Nothing solid. Sound of his descent, made small in the trees. The air colder and colder, coming closer to Satan and his maw frozen in the ice, so maybe purgatory is only where you think you’ve gone when you’re descending to hell, the mind still playing tricks, still refusing.
No limit to the darkness inside us, no limit at all. Vast and unrecognized, unvisited. But he will visit now, or at least try. He holds his arms out and turns in place, slipping downward, and tries to ingest all of it.
“Satan,” he says, calling to himself. “Come out come out wherever you are.”
The air heavier, thick with chill, and everything wet, the trees and ground and air, all waiting to freeze, sinking toward where the beast is frozen to his belly. He was lunging from the water, exploding upward, so the ice is jagged all around him, spikes and arches and curved thin mountains that would be impossible anywhere else, all on a scale enormous. We could climb Satan and stand on an eyelash and still he would be too small for what waits inside.
Jim decides he will no longer follow the rules. He runs downhill but does not lean back to adjust for gravity. A kind of fall, weightless, and running his legs to keep up but he soars and doesn’t know when the impact will come, all the world falling around Satan all the time, infinite collapse, and this is where Jim might meet himself face-to-face, fall into the mirror self, the one he can feel pulling at him day and night, keeping him from joy.
The hit softened too much by the leavings of the trees above, his face cushioned and body somersaulting, flipping into the darkness beyond but too brief and he’s curled on his stomach and panting and wills the scorpions to come. A sting to wake.
But nothing happens, and this is always the problem. He will not recognize himself in this darkness, find his mirror self, the source of that tug, or the larger frozen form. Hell is unreachable. That is what is most cruel about it. If we could go there, we could finish and be reassured.