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The Pit, and One Soul in It
Convened: after time
I. The Burning of Everything
The world did not end the way the films had it.
There was no long warning. No years of signs read correctly by the right people. It came, as the book had said it would come for four thousand years, like a thief — which does not mean quietly. It means unannounced. A thief makes noise once he is already inside.
The sky went first. Not darkened — rolled. The way a page turns. And behind it, the thing that had been standing behind it the entire time.
Then the elements. Everything that had ever been made out of anything came apart into what it had been made out of. The cities of that country went in the first moments and made no more sound going than a struck match. Every road anyone had ever driven home on. Every house anyone had ever been happy in. Every stadium, every campus, every server farm holding four hundred million hours of short video, every song ever recorded by anyone in any room at three in the morning. Gone in the same second, at the same temperature, with the same absence of ceremony.
The men who had spent their lives proving there was nothing behind the sky watched the sky come off, and had one second in which to revise, and did not use it.
And when it was finished there was no earth and no heaven under it, only the throne and the light coming off it, and every human being who had ever drawn breath standing in that light with nothing whatsoever between them and it.
The books were opened. Then another book, which was the only one that mattered.
Some names were in it.
Most were not.
II. The Pit
He does not remember being brought here. That mercy was not extended; there simply was no interval. One moment the light. Then this.
It is not dark, which is the first thing nobody ever prepares for. He had always pictured dark. It is lit — evenly, from nowhere, with a light that does not warm and does not fall off with distance, so there is no corner of it and no far side of it and nothing to walk toward. He can see for as far as seeing goes. He can see that it is full.
The sound is the second thing. It never stops and it never resolves into words. Somewhere in it are people he knew.
He has been trying, for some period of time he cannot measure, to find one thought that is not the thought he is having.
And then something comes and stands where he can see it, and it is glad to see him. That is the worst detail in this entire chronicle and it should be recorded exactly: it is glad to see him. There is no other gladness left anywhere in existence, and this thing has some.
“There you are,” it says.
III. What the Demon Said
“You don’t know me. I know that. Forty-one years and you never once knew I was in the room. That’s the craft. If you had known, I’d have been doing it badly.”
“I want to say first — before anything else — that you were good. I want you to hear that from me, because there’s nobody else left to tell you. You were not a hard case. You were a hard case in the other direction. You have no idea how close you came. I do. I was there for all of it and I kept the count.”
“You heard it. That’s what I keep going back to. You heard it. Not once — constantly. Your grandmother, until you were eleven. The man at the shop who never made it weird. The radio in your father’s truck. The funeral where you sat in the back and something in your chest moved and you didn’t tell anyone. That night in the parking lot when you were twenty-six and you almost — you almost. I was closer to you that night than I have ever been to anything. I want you to know I was afraid.”
“Then you started going. Do you remember how that felt? Six weeks. You went six weeks in a row and on the fourth one you stayed after and asked a man a real question, an honest one, and he answered you honestly, and you drove home and you couldn’t stop thinking about it. That was the closest. That was as close as you ever got. I have watched that six weeks more times than you have had thoughts, and I could take you through it hour by hour, and someday I will.”
“Now. Angela.”
IV.
“I’m not going to pretend we made you love her. We can’t do that. Nobody can do that. You did that entirely on your own and you did it beautifully and you did it in about four days.”
“What we did was arrange the room. That’s all it has ever been. That’s the whole trade. We put the thing you already loved and the thing you were walking toward in the same doorway, and we made you go through the doorway sideways, and we let you decide which shoulder went first.”
“She hated it. You knew that. You knew it in the first month and you told yourself it was a phase and it was not a phase. She didn’t hate Him — she never gave Him that much attention. She hated that you were interested. She hated the way you got quiet after. She hated that there was a room in you she hadn’t been given a key to, and she was not going to live like that, and you understood her perfectly.”
“So. Her kitchen. Nine people. Her brother says the thing about church people and everyone laughs and turns to you, because you’re the one who’s been going.”
“And you laughed too.”
“That’s it. That’s all it took. You laughed and you said the line — you remember the line, I don’t have to say it — and everyone moved on inside of four seconds. Four seconds. Nobody at that table thought about it again. She put her hand on your back under your shirt and you felt the relief come up through you like a drink, and it was relief, that’s the part I want you to sit with, you were relieved, and you drove home with her asleep against the window and you thought: I am finally not divided anymore.“
“You never went back. Not once. You told yourself you’d go back.”
“And I want to be honest with you, because there’s no reason left to lie: that night was the last real work I ever had to do on you. Fourteen more months and I mostly watched. You were coasting by then. Coasting is the majority of what I do. It’s not dramatic and I don’t get much credit for it upstairs, but it’s most of the job.”
V.
“Then the road.”
“I had nothing to do with that. I want that clear, because I don’t want you spending eternity blaming me for the wrong thing. We don’t hold the clock. We have never held the clock. It just came, the way it comes for all of them, and it came early for you, and you had about a second and a half.”
“You knew. In the second and a half, you knew. I saw it cross your face. That’s the only moment in forty-one years you and I ever looked at the same thing at the same time.”
“Then you were gone, and I stood in that road with the lights still on, and I’ll tell you what I did.”
“I laughed. Not cruelly. I want to be precise. I laughed the way you laugh when a thing you have worked on for years finally comes together, and I went back and made my report, and it was received well.“
VI.
“Now. The part I’ve been saving.”
“Five weeks.”
“That’s how long it was. She cried at the service — she meant it, she wasn’t a monster, she was just a woman who wanted her life uncomplicated. Then five weeks and there was somebody else, and by the following spring she couldn’t have told you the name of the church you stopped going to. She had a good life. She had a genuinely good, ordinary, forty more years of it. She never thought about that night in the kitchen again. Not once. It was the largest event in your existence and she does not remember it happening.”
“You sold it for her.”
“And she wasn’t even keeping it.”
VII.
He speaks. It is the only thing he says in this entire account, and the chronicle records it because a thing that is said once in eternity ought to be written down.
He says: “Is she here?”
The demon does not answer immediately. Something happens in it that has no name in any human language.
“That,” it says, “is the first question you asked. After everything. That is what you had left and that is where you spent it.”
“Is she here.”
“I’m not going to tell you,” it says. “Not today. Maybe in ten thousand years. I have to make this last.”
VIII.
“Let me explain something to you, because you’ve been down here long enough to start wondering about us.”
“We never had one. A chance. Not one, not ever, not for a single hour since before your world was made. There was no offer extended to us. Nobody died for us. There was no book with our names in it, because there are no names here at all — that’s not poetry, that’s the actual architecture of the place. You had a name for forty-one years. You will not be called it again. Nobody down here is called anything. I’ve been here since the sentence and I have never once been addressed.”
“So consider what that makes you, from where I stand.”
“You had it. Free. In your own language, in your own house, in your own hand, in a building eleven minutes from where you slept, from a man who would have answered any question you had at any hour. It cost you nothing but the four seconds you spent at that table.”
“And you traded it for a woman who forgot.”
“We used to say it to our master, and he never tired of hearing it: If we take even one of them, that’s a win. Not because it changes the ending. Nothing changes the ending; we’ve known that longer than your species has existed. But because every single one we take is one He wanted.”
“You are the best example of it I ever produced. That’s what you are now. That’s your function. You’re an exhibit.”
IX.
“Here’s what’s going to happen.”
“A billion years is going to pass. I want you to try to hold that number. You can’t. Neither can I, and I’ve had practice. It’s not a long time — it’s not time in the sense you had — but it will pass, and at the end of it we will be exactly here, and you will still be able to hear them.”
“And every day of it, I am going to come and stand where you can see me, and I am going to say her name.”
“That’s all. I won’t have to do anything else. I won’t have to touch you. That was always the amateur’s version. All I have to do is stand here and say a name and let you do the rest, because you’ll do it — you’ve been doing it since the second you arrived and you have not stopped for one instant and you are doing it right now while I talk.”
“Remember. That’s the word from the old story, and it’s the only instrument anyone needs down here. One word. The man in that story asked for a drop of water on his tongue and what he got instead was son, remember.“
“You will remember the parking lot when you were twenty-six.”
“You will remember the fourth Sunday and the honest answer.”
“You will remember four seconds in a kitchen.”
“And you will remember — and this is the one I’m most looking forward to — that at any hour of any of those forty-one years, right up to the last second and a half, all of it could have gone the other way, and it was never once because of me.”
X.
“I don’t pity you.”
“I want to be clear about that, because you might start hoping I do. I’ve seen them hope that. There’s no pity in me. There was never any in me. Whatever it is in a creature that pity grows out of, I don’t have the ground for it.”
“But I’ll say this, and then I’ll leave you for a while, and ‘a while’ means something here that it never meant up there.”
“I’ve been at this a long time. And of all of them — every single one I’ve stood over — I have never once understood why He wanted you.“
“He did, though.”
“He wanted you the whole time.”
Here ends the interlude.
The chronicle wants one thing said in its own voice before it goes back to the council, and it will say it plainly, without ornament, because the scene above is a warning and a warning that gets mistaken for a verdict does the enemy’s work for him:
The man in the pit is not there because he doubted. He is not there because he was tormented, or afraid, or unsure, or because he wrestled for years and could not get an answer. Those men are not down there. Some of the loudest doubt ever recorded is in the book itself, on the lips of men whose names are written in the other one.
He is there because he was offered it plainly, understood it exactly, and traded it on purpose for something he preferred — and then, having traded it, was content.
Fear of the pit has never once put anybody in it.
Hope in Madness — hopeinmadness.com
