©2005 Jeff Percifield
Sulphur River Review 2005
The distance between Heaven and Hell is just a few centimeters short of infinite.
When they discovered that I was a suicide who had entered Heaven illegally, they took me to a round stone well about ten meters across. Sentence was pronounced, my name was expunged from the Book, and, without further ceremony, they seized me and tossed me into the pit.
The horror of falling.
The bedrock of Heaven is immense, upholding eternity itself. In the madness of my initial descent, I tumbled headlong, whiplashed end over end until I was insensible, expecting at any moment to be dashed against the rocky floor. But it was bottomless, one of the great bore-holes of Heaven, said to have been constructed in the darkness before time, perhaps for ventilation. (Others said that the holes were organic, chewed out of the bedrock by eyeless, nameless things when Heaven was still young, before the universe was whelped.) I lost consciousness.
It is a peculiarity of the human condition that one can acclimate to all things, even unremitting terror. When I came to, I was still falling. Around me, nothing but air. I looked up; a dark cloud beetled high overhead. Something hit my arm.
"Oh!" I said. It was a wide-toothed hairbrush. I tried to grab it, but it whistled off on the wind.
"Ahoy there!"
Startled, I looked down. A man was falling not far below me. He waved up. "Stay there!" he called, somewhat gratuitously. But in a moment we were falling on more or less the same level. His name was Laszlo. He explained that I had been falling for many days; the dark cloud overhead was actually Heaven, slowly receding. We shouted back and forth till I was hoarse, at which point Laszlo wriggled sideways, with a peculiar swimming motion, until he was falling next to me.
"But where are we?" I shouted.
"Express elevator," he said, "the gulf between Heaven and Hell, which is almost measureless."
I peered down, but there was only the rushing emptiness. "Surely we must be near the bottom," I yelled.
He laughed. "We’re not even a tenth of a hundredth of the way," he said. "By the time you get to Hell, you will have forgotten all about it."
When I expressed skepticism, he reminded me that my previous life had transpired atop a blue ball that was not only pirouetting at high speed, but skittering round a sun like a marble in a groove, and I had been none the worse for it. And indeed, once I got my equilibrium, falling seemed quite natural. I asked if there were others, and Laszlo laughed again.
"Millions," he said, "billions."
According to Laszlo, the majority of the inhabitants of the falling world had never set foot in Heaven, but had been judged and found wanting immediately upon their demise, and tossed into the abyss. Laszlo himself was an exception: he had bribed his way into Heaven, only to be exposed during one of that paradise’s periodic audits.
Laszlo taught me slicing, the martial art of the falling world, whereby one wriggled sideways while falling. He also tutored me in the Zen of falling, which held that it was our fear that weighed us down, and if one freed oneself from fear and desire – desire simply being fear of unfulfillment – one escaped the gravity of terror and slowed one’s descent.
And indeed, I did manage through meditation to slow my fall, but when I realized this, I became so excited at the prospect of not just slowing but perhaps reversing my descent that my desire for Heaven was rekindled, and I plummeted again. (There were also gnostics, monastic sorts who were said almost to levitate, as well as mystics and madmen who described great looping arcs, without purpose or direction.)
Once I had mastered the art of slicing, and through meditation slowed my descent, I was able to explore the falling world, and met many people. There were philosophers, for instance, who held that there was no reality beyond the falling world. This school held that our memories were illusions, and that the very idea of a static world, i.e., one that was not rushing downwards, was not just an absurdity but an impossibility. Theologians, on the other hand, admitted the possibility of a static world, but deemed it an abomination. Still others postulated that a static world would be a proverbial straight line, and that Hell was just such a two-dimensional speculation, a line in which nothing at all existed.
Some said that the sensation of falling was itself an illusion, for if the gulf were infinite, how could be we said to be falling at all? A subset of this school held that we were indeed static, floating on the fierce updrafts from Hell, said to be so intense that none would ever reach that cyclonic Hades. (In the falling world, people sometimes had terrifying dreams of experiencing motionlessness, and woke up nauseous.)
Occasionally, one saw people shooting upwards, but none could explain this phenomenon.
In falling libraries, I perused theories of the underworld: Hell was a desert of hot curry powder, Hell was an alien world with no human sensibility, Hell was a torment of cruel and unrelenting pink, like an infinite flamingo. Others said that Hell was not an inferno but instead a region of extreme cold, so cold that long before we reached it, the air itself would become gelid and semi-solid, slowing our descent until we came to rest, cocooned in the frozen ether.
I read books about the algebras and diplomacies of the falling world, as well as fashionable diaries, the secret thoughts of falling ladies, some of whom were not too despairing to provide a little distraction from the fall. I also beheld falling cities, wild and sprawling architectures due to the singular aerodynamics of the falling world. I wriggled through the streets of these unspeakable creations and marveled at the resilience of consciousness, which sought always order and meaning in even the most inhospitable of conditions. (I wondered, too, if there were not some unimaginable, theoretical race of points, constructing labored philosophies and arcane cosmologies within the non-world of two-dimensions.)
I studied the geographies of the falling world, which stuck me as a contradiction, but Laszlo informed me that indeed, warring tribes had carved up the falling world into various regions, principalities, and spheres of influence. When I protested that such an idea was an absurdity, he reminded me that in my former life, the fiercest wars had been fought over invisible lines in the sand, sometimes represented by walls. (And indeed, one day, slicing through the ether, I came upon a falling wall, snaking across the Void; I gazed longingly past it, towards the unknown and forbidden regions beyond…)
And vanity: women devised elaborate upside-down hairstyles, like inverted cataracts, but the most desired of all were shellacked, sideways Kabuki constructions that stuck straight out like a nun’s winged headdress, because in a vertical world, the perpendicular is most subversive, and hence most rare. (This is why religious sorts considered slicing – horizontal movement through the falling world – a sacred art.) In addition, people devised musical instruments of fantastical and complex configurations, the wind rushing through mazes of reeds, stops, and valves to create a unique, otherworldly falling music.
I was touched by the tenacity of humanity, persevering even in the cataclysm of the falling world, and I felt sadness for the bourgeois denizens of Heaven, who would never know the elegiac beauty of the Void, souls dropping like raindrops, and I wept tears that hissed and turned to salt.
And still I fell, through clinging fogs and sudden hot updrafts. Heaven receded to a flat moon, a holy blemish, a damn’d spot, a dark star that never entirely faded. Occasionally I witnessed distant pyrotechnics, electrochemical flares of stabbing scarlet and orange, or more rarely blue or green, writhing like dragons. These were caused by the ionization of sulphurs in the Void, which was comprised chiefly of æther and phlogiston.
Because of the immense distance between Heaven and Hell, not just cities but entire civilizations rose and fell within the romance of the falling world. The art of war was also practiced, and it must have been a hypnotic spectacle to behold an entire army slicing towards you through the æther with their unimaginable and abominable weapons: disabling colors, virulent nostalgias, lethal numerals, and malignant musical notes.
mobile phone radiation healthThere was also falling jurisprudence: criminals were bound tightly, a balloon strapped to their backs, and then set aloft, to twist forever through the airs. There were also mechanistic societies that experimented with curious engines, attempting through the propulsion of great turbines and motors to defy the fall and hover in place. At first such experiments were limited to unmanned platforms carrying sensitive instruments and magnetic equipment, but later on, intrepid souls were set adrift on these floating apostasies and quickly disoriented by the sudden cessation of falling. (There were rogues and demagogues who held falling rallies, angry cries echoing through the Void, who stirred the denizens of the falling world with dreams of mechanized cities that could rise up and defy Heaven, but the technology to do this was purely hypothetical.)
Our gaze was not always upwards, however. Scientists developed telescopes to peer into the abyss and measure its depth*. Far, far below, these sensitive implements recorded faint streaks, the Doppler shifts of those falling beneath us. Some of these were now so distant – eons distant – that they could be said to no longer exist, having perhaps long ago reached the bottom (though most scientists considered this a statistical impossibility).
I wondered at those remote streaks. Who were they? Even in the falling world there was companionship, but there must have been some, out there on the edge, who had fallen before all else, and were always first, always solitary. To fall was our doom; to fall alone, unimaginable.
And still I fell. Speculations on the nature of our destination now seemed pointless, for were we not caught in a limitless descent that for all practical purposes would never cease? And even when I did dream of that distant eternity when the fall would end, the precise nature of that underworld struck me as irrelevant. Folkloric Hades or alien anti-landscape, it didn’t matter, for either would have taken from us the beauty and tragedy of the fall. We were of the æther, and even if, through the madness of some circular universe, we had found ourselves at the end of all things upon the floors of Heaven, we would have sat in sadness, and hung our heads, sighing for the ecstasy of the falling world.
* The breadth of the abyss was expressed by a numeral nearly a meter long, but the depth could only be conveyed by exponents.