Content Warning: Language and Bodily Movements
Arthur Abernath’s life had been pretty good until he learned he was damned forever. The main problem, aside from the damnation itself, was that Arthur learned this fact much earlier than every other person, who found out when they arrived at Hell: he found out on his computer when he was thirty-one years old.
You are damned. Do you understand?
Yes. No.
The pop-up box caught Arthur by surprise, for obvious reasons. What was peculiar about it, aside from the message, was that there was no exit button to remove the box. He could only click on one of the two buttons. He was not entirely careful, but he took pains to avoid websites that felt they lent themselves to viruses and similar computer problems.
The IT man was even more confused when Arthur brought him his laptop after trying to reboot his computer on his own, only to find the message remained in the same pop-up box. Finally, desperate for another clue as to the nature of the message, the IT worker clicked “No.”
A new box popped up in place of the old:
Not you. Arthur. Does he understand?
Yes. No.
“Well that’s no good,” the IT man mumbled. “Here let me get you another computer.”
Twenty minutes later Arthur had a new, prediction-less laptop and was back to work. It was unsettling, but he soon forgot about it. Odd things happen all the time: we have space in our conception of the world for them to fit in, because there’s always a rational explanation other than the supernatural.
Except in this case. In this case, Arthur was damned.
The next day amidst his bills was an envelope of thick, expensive paper. The return address simply read “Hell.” Inside, the same message written in dark red ink:
You are damned. Do you understand?
Yes. No.
It was a Saturday and the post office was closed, so Arthur would have to wait until after work on Monday to ask the local post office for an explanation. On his day of waiting, he received another letter, slid under his front door, bearing the same message.
You must understand, Arthur really was damned. But how long would it take for you to believe such a claim? For Arthur, he still did not believe it after visiting the post office and being told there were a number of letters addressed to him, all with the same message written on them. He did not believe it after finding a tiny scroll rolled up inside of a taco he bought late on Friday night. He did not believe it after strangers on the street would tell him he was damned as he walked by them, only to not remember saying anything to him once he interrogated them.
Over and over the same question: do you understand? Arthur did not understand.
He started to get uneasy when he had dreams about Hell, always different but with the same theme: a spot of eternal torment reserved just for him. One night it would be a vat of acid, the next, a cage over flames. One night it would be his parents asking him when he would finally get married, the next, it was a devil in red spandex with horns stabbing him with a pitchfork. One involved eternal isolation in the darkness, another featured him crushed beneath thousands of other bodies, suffocating under the weight.
They were not pleasant dreams.
Would all of this convince you of your own damnation? It did not for Arthur, but he was not raised to believe in an afterlife. He was not an agnostic or atheist: what happened after you died just never occurred to Arthur as a question worth asking. He did become convinced of something, however: there was a problem that did exist.
It was the day that the therapist could finally meet with Arthur that he saw his first demon. (In the week and a half up to that day, he had been informed of his damnation via snakes on his driveway, laid out in cursive; via graffiti on an alley wall; via a message from a match on a dating app; via his reflection which moved of its own accord, breathed along the mirror to fog it up, and then wrote it out for him… all in addition to pop-ups on the computer and the letters with the return address of Hell.
But he would be fixed today, or at least start the process. There’s a great comfort in suspecting you are experiencing a delusion. Arthur assumed that it was far more likely he had lost his grip on reality due to some chemical imbalance, or tumor on the brain, than the reality that there was a Hell and he was destined for it. Though the hallucinations perturbed him, he found that if he recognized what he was experiencing as not real, he could ignore it until things became normal again.
But then the demon.
Everyone suspects demons to be evil, but they also are explicitly rude. There is a perversion of all things in them: why would social conventions be any different? It appeared right as he was about to get into his car to drive to the therapist.
“Arthur Abernath…” it hissed, or growled, or roared. It may have also whispered or cracked or spewed. Really it did all of these things, and Arthur did not so much heard with his ears as internally feel the infernal voice. Hopelessness, dread, despair, hatred, sorrow, and many more emotions filled his soul while his body felt both hot and cold at the same time, to a terrible degree.
At a football game at Arthur’s university there had been a mascot that walked around as the personification of the school and its spirit. To an analogical degree, that’s what stood/floated/slithered/hanged as the entity in front of him. Or imagine one could describe as a person the feeling that summer engenders as a child, full of whimsy, hope, relaxation, and joy. What would that person look like? The demon was the opposite of all of that, and Arthur intuited, correctly, that this image was just a visual symbol of an imperceptible higher reality: that the real demon was indeed in the room with him, but not as anything that possesses a definitive form or corporeal body where it is here but then there is a line and there it is not. Arthur could trace out the limit of his car’s form, but not the invisible presence of the infernal spirit in front of him. Though he looked at it, he also knew he was immersed in it, and that it was in the air all around him, in whatever space the air occupied, though how he was conceiving of space was only analogy for a higher plane where space and time do no exist, as there is no body for the spiritual.
The visual symbol of the demon haunted him: it consisted of geometry that could not- should not- exist. Profane angles and interpenetrations warred and warped in the thing’s being. It oozed and wheezed, with a horrible stench about it. The air around the image discolored and grew hairy. The entirety of the image existed in a constant flux of inversion and unnatural movement. Arthur could not discern any approximation of organs of sight, speech, hearing or touch, but innately knew this thing was capable of all of this and more.
The demon did not do him the courtesy of limiting the metaphysical consequences for Arthur, delighting in causing him such confusion and a headache. Demons prefer terrible suffering, but even little suffering can be delicious.
“Arthur Abernath…” it said again. “Do you understand?” The voice was like a baby being stabbed by a thousand knives.
“No!” he found his voice faraway from him.
“At last he answers. You’ve been annoying the hell out of us… pun not intended- though they usually are. So, no you do not understand that you are damned?” the demon asked.
“Uh…”
“What is there to not understand? When you die you are going to Hell. Now do you understand?” The demon was, expectantly, impatient.
Arthur lost his voice as he peed his pants. Demons are terrifying, you must understand. It isn’t the wisest idea to employ a demon to send a message, as they are so scary the recipient seldom hears the message. But of course, wisdom is a virtue which devils sorely lack.
“Fine, I’ll come back later and tell you again some other time.”
And suddenly, the presence was gone.
Arthur threw up, then changed his clothes, and ran every red light and stop sign on the way to his new therapist.
The therapist was uneasy when she met Arthur. After all, Arthur entered in a rather manic state from his encounter with the demon. Ever the seasoned professional, the therapist listened to Arthur’s hallucinations calmly and was prepared for her usual course of action in treating such a severe pattern of delusions. That is, she was prepared until the demon showed up a second time.
The therapist fainted from fear.
“Have you had time to understand?” The demon asked Arthur.
“No.” Arthur sputtered, shaking.
The demon sighed. “Look, I already explained this once. You are damned. Destination: Hell. I really don’t want to see you again until you die.”
“Why?”
“Because I hate you.”
“Why am I damned?”
“Look dumbass, I don’t get told everything. Demons are all liars, so whatever I’ve been told I know for a fact is not the case. Just know you are damned and you are going to Hell. We need verbal confirmation. Do you understand?”
“I don’t!”
“Son of a bitch! I hate when I have to do this.” The demon left his presence again. The moment it did, a weight, a coldness, a vacuousness- or rather, all three being metaphors of whatever its presence communicated- lifted from the room and the therapist awoke.
“I fainted!” She said.
Arthur only looked at her, shaking. His face had lost all of its color.
“What happened?” she asked.
Through chattering teeth Arthur answered “Demon. I need help. Please- pills or something…” but the therapist did not hear beyond the mention of the thing that had frightened her to unconsciousness.
“I saw it too….” she muttered, her eyes darting back and forth. “Excuse me for a moment! I must confer with a colleague.” She dashed from the room, leaving Arthur alone.
After a minute or two Arthur heard in his soul the sound of trumpets, golden and triumphant. He felt a rumbling in the room as the air seemed rift open above him. After his two encounters with the demon, Arthur would have estimated that there was nothing more terrifying than its image, coupled with the feeling the spirit engendered.
Then he saw an angel and shit his pants.
It was the same deal as the demon, in that a small part of him sensed the thing he saw was, at most, his brain’s understanding of a higher reality, like a two dimensional flat creature seeing only the points where a cube of the third dimension intersected with his reality, but the image horrified him. Wheels and eyes, wings and fire all twisted and spun, faster and faster, but all eyes were focused on him. Accompanying the image was another sense, or spirit, like how one feels the dread of a Sunday evening before work, or the hum in the air at a parade. This sense was so immensely good, that Arthur, with his few and mild sins, felt like an object of reproachable evil; of a moldy scum so vitriolic and terrible it would be right for this righteous being to destroy him. It was only his small sense of self-preservation that squeaked and protested this just annihilation. He was not sure if he was more scared of true good or true evil.
The angel spoke in a voice inside of Arthur’s head, like the harmony of a thousand choirs, “Do not be afraid!”
It was a little late for that.
“What is this I hear that you do not understand the terms of your pronouncement?” the Angel asked.
Arthur could not speak for fear. At that moment the therapist and another doctor opened the door to behold a celestial spirit of the nine choirs of heaven in the room with Arthur. They ran, terrified.
“I was enjoying the eternal bliss of contemplating God’s face for all eternity. It is not pleasant to be dragged away just to let a member of the damned make sure that they get the picture. But rules are rules. Tell me you understand.”
A direct order from this being filled his will with so much necessary obedience he felt himself compelled to answer affirmatively. It was only a small part of him that could not be dominated without his consent that held back an automatic answer. But that part, at last, relented, as it was the truth.
“Yes, I understand.” Arthur said.
“It’s about time!” The Angel said before rising back through the rift, presumably to return to the throne room of God to enjoy an eternal beatitude from which Arthur was firmly excluded.
After an experience like that, what do you do next? Life isn’t like a movie where one can cut to the next scene. The angel left, the demon left, and Arthur had to drive home, because where else do you go and what else do you do? He still had to eat that evening, and put on his pajamas and lay in bed and go to sleep. A mass hallucination with two therapists doesn’t change much: even after the most traumatizing of events, you have to eventually go somewhere else and go to bed.
Though he had told the Angel that he understood, he still did not entirely understand. He wasn’t entirely sure he believed it (would you? Insanity is far more likely, after all.) It was then he took on the role of the pursuer, rather than that of the pursued, as he aimed to contact his therapist to affirm that what had happened had really happened.
She was out of work for two weeks. He tried to figure out where she lived, but had no such luck.
In the meantime he went to work, went home, watched tv, ate dinner, and went to sleep, except on weekends, when he would sit on his computer and try to figure out what his disease could be.
Finally he got in touch with his therapist who assured him that they were both insane, which brought a little bit of comfort to Arthur. He was given pills to take daily to combat the hallucinations. As he took them he felt like he could breathe for the first time in two weeks. It was over.
Until he received a message on his TV one evening, disrupting the episode he was streaming like it was a cable airing interrupted for a severe weather update. The screen read:
This is your monthly reminder that you are damned.
(You will be reminded on the first of every month. If you want to change your reminder date to a different day of the month, fuck you.)
Arthur read the message three times. Shaking, he called his Therapist’s office emergency line. Before leaving, he took a picture of the TV with his phone. It was good he did because the screen returned back to streaming moments later.
It was on the drive over that Arthur finally considered that he might really be damned for all time, forever tortured in Hell from the moment he dies until forever. Though his therapist disagreed, he couldn’t shake the idea once it took root. His doctor could not explain the picture of the tv, or of all the letters he had brought with him. He suspected she thought he made them all himself.
Over the next couple weeks, the therapist tried to convince him of his delusion, but the idea remained deeply in his brain. It was true. He was damned. He understood.
Arthur Abernath had never considered his future too deeply. He regarded himself as an ordinary man in every sense of the word and his life reflected it. He went from high-school to college, and college to work. He was approximately where he should be for having labored in the workforce for almost a decade. He had normal interests, like sports and movies. He had normal friends that he saw a normal amount of times. He was currently single but had dated several women, all of whom were exactly who you’d expect him to date. His past was not without its traumas, as all lives are, but they were the kind and sort that were too subtle and too gentle to really affect his life in any noticeable regard. And his life was to continue on this trajectory: he would get married, have kids, keep working until he retired, enjoy his time with family, get older until he died. It was a fine, albeit predictable, and average, life.
But then he got damned…
A number of thoughts went through his head, first and foremost, why was he damned? Is getting un-damned a thing?
The first time Arthur entered a church, he expected to burst into flames. Many sinners joke about such a thing happening, but few sinners had heaven and hell open for them as they had for Arthur to confirm their final destination.
Though he had been raised in a Church, he along with his family had slowly stopped attending over his teenage and young adult life. Perhaps before all of this he believed in a vague higher-power, but left it well enough alone. But he had encountered not only a higher power but a lower one too, and was careening towards the latter, it appeared.
The church was empty, its stage with drums and instruments at the front, dark. Rows of chairs aimed towards large, black projector screens. Arthur shook the pastor’s hand when he came out of his office. He had called ahead for an appointment.
“No holy water or something?” Arthur asked as they sat in some comfy armchairs in an annex by some windows.
The Pastor smiled. “No, that’s the Catholics. Same God though.”
Arthur had just called the first church he had thought of.
“I’m not crazy,” Arthur said. These words were quickly becoming commonplace in his speech, both in the recent weeks, but even more in the years to come.
“You don’t give that impression,” the Pastor said honestly as they sat.
“I’m damned.” Arthur said. “I’m damned for all time and I know it.”
The Pastor shifted, giving him silence before speaking. “Well, okay, why do you think so?”
Arthur shifted uncomfortably. “Because I’ve been alerted to the fact in a number of ways over the past couple weeks, including being told so by a demon and an angel.”
The Pastor said nothing.
“I’m not crazy!” Arthur repeated.
“Sounds… intense.”
Arthur related the entire ordeal to the man of faith who, to his credit, sat and listened without interrupting.
“Well, I’d definitely recommend continuing to see your therapist,” the Pastor said at the end. “As for your soul, it’s quite easy, all you have to do is accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior”
“And then I’m un-damned?”
“We use the term ‘Saved,’ but yes. God is really that generous. If you like, I can guide you through the prayer right now.”
“But how do you know that it works?” Arthur asked. “How do I know I’ll be saved? Is there an angel that comes down and confirms it?”
“In my experience, no.” The Pastor admitted. “It’s not about confirmation and evidence, it’s about faith. Faith is what saves us, and when you put your faith in God, you are saved. You can’t confirm it just like you can’t confirm when your wife tells you she loves you, you just have to believe her based on the promises she made.”
“But you can confirm it. I’ve had it confirmed that I’m damned.”
The Pastor rubbed his eyes, he didn’t enjoy speaking with radical Calvinists. “It’s worth a shot, isn’t it? Don’t you want to be saved?”
“That’s why I’m here! I never gave this faith stuff any thought, but I’ll do anything to get out of this.”
“Okay, then repeat after me, ‘Heavenly Father, you so loved the world that you gave your only Son…”
Arthur repeated it.
“...So that they might have eternal life and never die…”
The words felt nice to say to Arthur.
“I am a sinner who cannot save myself.”
True, Arthur sincerely felt.
“But I believe your Son, Jesus Christ, who conquered sin and death can save me.”
Perhaps he could be saved.
“And so I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and my Savior.”
He braced himself for the angel, or perhaps the demon, to confirm his status.
“I give my life and soul to him, so I may love and serve him in this life and be with him forever in the next life.”
Arthur finished the words and felt radiant.
“So that’s it?” he asked.
“Congratulations, my brother, you just bought a one-way ticket to Heaven.”
The next day Arthur awoke smiling, feeling light and rejuvenated. He had spent the evening reading the Bible for the first time in his life.
As he got out of bed he noticed a smear of red on his sheets. It looked wet and red. It was all over the back of his pajamas too. Had he cut himself that badly? Pulling the blanket back, he saw that he had slept on words, written on his bed:
Nice try. Still damned.
And so began Arthur’s three-year odyssey for the right religion, the one that would save him. He was baptized several times by different churches; he attended Shabat services; he visited a Mosque he found and prayed the Shalat for a couple of days; he actively invited both Jehovah’s Witnesses and Missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to explain their literature to him; in addition to researching Buddhism, Hinduism, Scientology, New Age practices, Wiccanism, Psychicism and all other -isms that crawled upon the face of the earth. He voraciously pursued this path, with each one finally ending with the same message (delivered via such means as a palm reading, a parrot far from its natural habitat relaying the message, twin girls holding hands chanting a rhyming couplet over and over outside of his house, splayed across the front page of the first newspaper he had picked up in his life, written in cursive with a heart over the eye when a waitress left him her number, night terrors speaking to him, a ghost, and the usual computer pop-ups and letters from Hell) until finally the demon showed up again, rather unexpectedly, to explain to him that he should give up because none of it was going to work for him, though it worked for other people. He was a special case.
There is no condition quite so intolerable as that of being special. It is the state of being ultimately and finally alone.
There comes a time in every person’s life when he or she will finally see that death indeed waits inexorably at the end. When that day comes there is an inevitable increased desire for life. It may manifest itself as a renewed vigor for experience that lasts the greater part of an afternoon, or in a camping trip, a vacation abroad, or an indulgence in some extreme sport like skydiving. A small percentage are forever chilled by their brush with mortality and have the entire course of their lives changed. Fewer still accept it at a fundamental level and manage to live in the same manner that they will die.
Arthur Abernath was the exception to the rule, for he knew death was coming, but could not approach it with a shred of hope or uncertainty. Even the most affirmative individuals will breath their last with the conviction of what comes next hanging ever so slightly in the balance. Not Arthur.
Like the many dying he did begin to ask himself how he should best spend the time he had before eternal pain began. The object of a life well-lived is to make death as acceptable as possible; when torment and torture await, there are woefully few perspectives that make death seem acceptable in any possible capacity.
The usual nihilism crossed his mind: if he was already doomed, why not indulge in all matters of meanness and common crookery that the specter of judgment always prevented? This metaphysical predicament, of course, did not censor his conscience. Arthur Abernath was by all means a perfectly normal man. He was even a decent man. He possessed no dark fantasies, repressions, societal grudges, or the like. Any of the urges that he repressed for fear of breaking some social taboo were by all means remarkably tame and quite banal. Shoplifting, voyeurism, hard drugs, and generally all illegality were counted among the things that he just could not bring himself to do, regardless of the fact that he was to be punished as if he committed all of them. He got drunk quite a bit more, but perhaps those destined for hell can be given a break when they choose to self-medicate.
As anyone might guess, over the next decade of his life Arthur developed an enduring state of depression. His dread of the first of every month turned to dull apathy, as all things did. He could not engage in a long-term relationship, though he certainly (and healthily) tried to find some type of meaning in the various relationships of his life. But nothing could sustain him long enough as the crushing hopelessness of his situation would rush back in. All happiness was supposed to be a sign of things greater still ahead, that the world did possess lights and inspiration, and small pleasures like laughter, love, and beauty ran this engine of hope eternally, instead for Arthur were an inverse reminder that none of these things could sustain him. Such is the fate of all those who are more sinned against than sinning: the world runs on hope from the smallest cup of coffee to the highest mountain on the horizon. To lose hope is to lose all pleasure, all joy, and all meaning. Devoid of those, to what can man turn for consolation?
It sometimes struck Arthur that he ought to create a bucket list to accomplish something, at least on paper. Issues arose from two problems. First, most bucket list items risked death, (such as skydiving, scuba diving, cave diving… really all of the divings) and Arthur Abernath had a very healthy fear of death (something that for most people should be overcome, but makes obvious sense for a man who knows exactly what death means for himself. Such is the reason why he didn’t kill himself: Arthur Abernath became a very, very cautious man.) Bucket list items also were not viable to him because they required money, which Arthur had woefully little of. Soul-crushing jobs only work if you have a soul to crush in the first place. Instead of a beautiful mosaic of a life, his life was spent mostly alone, living paycheck to paycheck, and with no remarkable things of note. And Arthur Abernath did not care. It was good practice for what would come next.
Throughout this entire time Arthur continued seeing his therapist. It was rather difficult to obtain help from someone that couldn’t solve the problem. If he could be convinced of his delusion, he might be able to employ such sound therapeutic practices. The problem was that his mental stability was working completely normally. It was not an ill mind he suffered from, but damnation. But he never once met a person who understood what he was experiencing. There was the inexorable stumbling block of his certainty, which absolutely appalled other individuals. Christians hated him, as did atheists. There is one thing for certain that all humans despise and that is the certainty held by another upon a fact that they themselves are certain, whether it is a lack of doubt in an afterlife, or the certainty that no one can be certain of what comes next after we die.
Perhaps it is the sentimentality that sometimes blossoms with age if pettiness and cynicism do not calcify an individual that one day in his fifties led Arthur to the conclusion that perhaps instead of feeling sorry for himself, he could at least garner some meaning by leaving the world a better place than he found it. Perhaps it was in the small moments of kindness and tenderness that he shared with others he could not allay his own Hell, but he could diminish Hell on earth, at least a little bit.
The mood quickly passed.
On the day Arthur Abernath, age eighty-three, was to die of an aortic dissection (a remarkably quick, but even more remarkably painful death involving a tearing in the inner lining of aorta, the main artery from the heart to the body, which feels akin to an agonizing (and I mean agonizing) ripping in the chest) he received a rather unusual message on his computer.
Your damnation has been revoked. Do you understand?
Yes. No.
There were many things that Arthur Abernath understood. In his quest to avoid Hell he had become an expert on all religions and philosophies. He had read all the great literature of the world in hopes of some small chance that he might find something to avoid his fate. He knew life more deeply and intimately than most, on account of his utter alienation from experiencing it as if any of it mattered.
This he did not understand.
He clicked ‘No’ and a second message took the place of the first
You are no longer damned. Do you understand?
Yes. No.
He did not understand why, but he understood what. He was saved. It happened without prompting or cause; it came without warning or signal. But it happened.
Arthur had sometimes, in his earlier days, dreamed of receiving a message just like this. He imagined what he would feel: elation, joy, overwhelming happiness. He did not expect the immediate deepening of his depression to a level he had never felt before.
The first minute he surveyed his life and saw what a complete and utter waste it had been. Void of accomplishment, mark, or legacy of any kind. It lacked all noteworthiness and was a remarkably mediocre, unremarkable existence.
The next minute he thought of all of the relationships he had ruined with his family, friends and lovers. He regretted what happened in the second minute and rued what could have been in the third minute.
The fourth minute he looked ahead at the uncertain amount of time he still had left and despaired that he had no resources or momentum to create anything meaningful in the time that remained. He felt he was too old and it was too late for him to create anything of the few, dark years ahead of him.
The fifth minute he contemplated killing himself.
Another message on his computer appeared:
Just kidding. Still damned. Fuck you. Do you understand?
Yes. No.
And then Arthur’s aortic artery tore, killing him painfully and quickly.