A SECOND PURGATORY SHORT STORY
9:3550:3002, reads the overhead display across from me. Each number is made of unilaterally spaced LED dots glowing hellish red. Occasionally one or two flicker.
The train is stalled in place, as usual. Every day in Hell, multiple times a day, all trains regardless of position or station grind to a halt where they stand. They groan and shudder, wheels creaking laboriously, before they come to an agonizing stop. Ours has stopped in the middle of the tracks and is now idling aimlessly.
"Faulty lines are being repaired," drones the low, garbled voice over the loudspeakers. "Will be online within the hour. Thank you for your patience."
This is a lie, of course; compulsory track repairs can take anywhere between thirty minutes to seven hours. Who knows how long they'll decide to take this time. There is likely no fault to begin with, so they have free reign to draw out this interruption as long as they see fit. This is for the same purpose as the Departments' faulty elevators, the eternally congested roads, and the malfunctioning elevators. It is to establish a dull and persistent inconvenience to day-to-day life, so complacency never settles.
The walls rumble softly. The carriages are jammed between stations, leaving us devoid of even the buzzing platform lights to illuminate the inside. Five metal boxes engulfed by total darkness.
I work at the Greed department in the 31st sector of Hell. My worker identification code is 5505-3028-3044, the number I use to clock in and clock out, to purchase food and drink from standard-issue vending machines, to enter and exit Department buildings when I arrive or leave work.
My coworker Robert Ukobach once said that our contracts, to which our souls are bound, probably have our codes burned into the paper. I said, you're probably right. We probably have those codes seared into our organs, he said further, sandwich crumbs and tiny strips of lettuce in his teeth (it was his lunch break). I said, you're probably right. This is the extent of the majority of my interactions with Robert Ukobach.
I make a point not to think of these things often, but with the amount of time I spend doing nothing, much of which is compulsory, the mind tends to wander to unsavory topics.
The train jolts. I wonder for a second if we are moving — it's a false alarm. All the standing passengers lurch in unison, bending backwards precariously, then snapping back like a bundle of willow tree boughs.
I survey the masses. Across from me is a woman with a toad-like face. Gray hair done up in a bun, crimson lipstick smeared on her wide mouth. Maybe doesn't work in Hell, but certainly frequents there. There would be no reason for makeup otherwise. Her frown is deepset, but there's no telling if that's her current mood or just her face. Rather than looking at me she is looking down at her phone, glowering at something on the screen.
I profile her face, trying to imagine what set of footsteps led her onto this malfunctioning train. Where did she come from? Probably an apartment, either inside or on the outskirts. Hell offers a discount for rent on its property. Perhaps this woman lives in one of the flesh buildings with family, insofar as much that concept exists to her, subsisting on the paychecks of her adult child. A strange dichotomy ported over from humans, who live together in family units. It's not one to one, but it's undeniable that there was an influence. Lots of things in Hell are like this, subtly human-touched — though if you asked any of the residents, jingoists that they are, they would deny it. Talk of humans is taboo, even though the cities we walk are modeled off human cities, with borrowed human architecture, brimming with human advertisements, human-shaped molds for the latest bodies, first and last names for human-style identification. My name — Qúy — is human in origin. And human makeup of course.
Which brings me back to the toad-faced woman, scowling down at the illumination produced by her electronic device. I wonder what she is looking at. It is astonishingly modern for a demon of her generation.
The overhead display reads 9:3750:6300. The train is no closer to running.
—
I arrive at the office at 10:6006:1089. The time it took for the trains to come back online was not the worst. It still made me 24 minutes late for work. I clock in and endure a mild interrogation from Elspeth Amaimon, our building's secretary. He is immaculately groomed, appropriately vicious but altogether unenthusiastic. Lately, he has been slacking in his secretarial duties, past the bare minimum of checking who comes in and out. I suspect it has to do with a breakup with his most recent suitor, but ultimately that is just speculation. I would ask him, but he doesn't like me much.
I walk to my office, whose boundaries are about .4" in length and width from being a glorified cubicle, my desk shoved snug against the left wall next to my coworker's, whose name strangely escapes me. We work in what others might deem uncomfortably close conditions but I do not mind it. I spend the majority of the day absorbed in accounting spreadsheets, and he has headphones. He also is not in often as of late, so I tend to get the office to myself.
It vexes me slightly that I cannot remember my coworker's name, but I am unwilling to get myself in trouble snooping to find it. It's strange to begin with that I haven't heard it offhand somewhere in conversation, gossip between coworkers, over the loudspeaker to call him to the front. I suppose it goes to show his level of relative forgetability. There are many workers like this in Hell, interchangeable office drones who serve little more than to fill out space in cubicles; it could be argued that I fit the category, though I'd argue that the coworker whose name I don't recall surely fits it more.
Sitting down, I subsume myself into the half-aware state that allows me to work and think about nothing at the same time. I am an expert at holding this state and can do so for up to twelve hours, though I generally only have to hold it for five. My fingers move across the keyboard like spider legs, typing long strings of letters and numbers that my brain barely registers. The average employee types 40 words a minute; in this state, I can type up to 140. My hands produce receipts of data as efficiently and mindlessly as a printer. I become a machine.
11:3034:660. I belatedly notice my coworker has, yet again, not shown up. I continue working unabated. 11:3435:720. I take my lunch break. I approach one of the standard vending machines and input my employee identification number to get myself a protein cake and canned coffee. I would normally go back to my desk to eat, but I decide to enjoy myself with something dangerous. There is a storage closet three floors down which is abandoned and in slight disrepair but not barred off. There, behind the slightly damaged walls covered in wooden boards, I can sit in a private dark, a tiny space illuminated softly by the daylight glowing through the window, where no one will bother me. It is not a place I visit often because I do not want it to be discovered, or worse, refurbished. Today, however, I arrived late to work after sitting on a train for over an hour, and I feel the urge to indulge. Gathering my foodstuffs and single allotted cigarette, I head to the stairwell.
Two by two down the steps. The hallway, bereft of offices of any real import, is empty, the storage closet door ajar, beckoning. I slip unnoticed into this forgotten corner of the world.
Here in the 31st sector is my favorite place: a creaky box of planks riddled with holes and erosions. There is the suggestion of drywall near the entrance, but most of the walls are stripped bare, skeletons of wood and steel exposed. On the far side, a window — a tiny, malformed plane of redlight spilling through in a perfect square. I can see a broad slice of the city from here, one sheath of the spiral of iron and steel that Hell is made of. And people, barely more than specks, crawling like ants between the building-formed grooves.
Light from the third sun warms my face with its red glow. I pick at my protein cake and watch the tiny dots mill in the hundreds below. Another opportunity to play my favorite game. I pick one dot to watch. I try to imagine its name, its appearance, its articles of clothing, its pronouns, the style of its hair, eye color, the tint of its teeth. What sort of home does it emerge from every day. What menial job does it work. What pair of shoes does it stare down as it walks the impious streets, hard against the concrete, distant sirens wailing through the thick smell of smoke. I lose almost as much time here as I do making numbers.
Eventually I focus up. Can't stay in reverie forever. I check the time — 11:3045:303. I have enough time to smoke my cigarette before I go back to my office. There is a locker in which I store my belongings, one of which is a lighter I store here for extra discretion; I go to retrieve it. I open the door.
At first I'm confused, because I don't know what I'm seeing. A strange bulging swath of cream-colored fabric. In a split second I realize that I'm looking at the rumpled leg of a pair of dress pants, attached to one of flesh. A foot clad in a sensible brown loafer falls out the open locker door without anything to buffer it, and the momentum brings with it the rest of the lower half. The impact sends a miniature wave of dust and powdered drywall across the floor.
A man's body lies half on the floor, half wedged in a locker, bereft of life and dignity. I do not recognize him at first. Putting my hand before his mouth, I sense no breath being drawn. He has no pulse.
I realize belatedly that the body is my coworker whose name still eludes me. His face stares up at me, bloodless, mouth agape like a dead fish.
11:3438:108. I stare at him pondering what to do. He gazes back at me; his empty face, its lack of expression, unsettles and for some reason irks me a little. I really do not want to be caught in this room with the inexplicable cadaver of my officemate. Especially not during work hours.
Something in his pocket buzzes. I fumble for it. A phone. Burner, from the looks of it, or perhaps his tastes are just very cheap. I go to answer but think better. I let it keep ringing until it goes to voicemail.
"You have one(1) new message," the automated voice cheerfully informs me. It beeps and plays the recording:
Several seconds of static. Deep within the waves I pick out even breathing, so faint it could be mistaken for the wind... then, breaking through, a voice, so dear and delicate it feels like it could break apart at the slightest touch.
"Korandir..." The voice is identifiably masculine but soft. Tender, as if just roused from sleep.
"I forgive you. I'll be at the dock. Waiting."
Three more seconds of static, then the message ends with a beep.
—
19:6550:4803, reads the overhead display across from me. I shift in my seat, unable to stop my leg from occasionally bouncing. The movement jostles my briefcase, which holds the body of my coworker whose name I don't recall folded like a tablecloth.
It was the most logical step to take, before you voice concerns; I couldn't very well exit the storage room with my dead coworker's body in tow, and upon experimenting, I could not maneuver it in a way that seemed natural enough to fool onlookers. Drastic situations call for drastic measures. My briefcase, which contains 600 square feet of empty space sourced from a pocket dimension, was the only way to discreetly transport the cadaver and avoid suspicion. It was surprisingly painless all things considered. Going one limb at a time, I was able to worm in the entire body with relative ease, though I struggled a bit with the trunk, where a not insubstantial amount of office-induced body fat rests.
A school of people surrounds me, packed together, swaying with the motions of the train. None know the contents of my briefcase; none know that the body of a man, presumed missing, is less than a foot away from their presence. My pulse rings from the top of my skull down through my whole body. My heart pounds. The tips of my fingers tingle with a strange excitement. It's a similar feeling to walking those three sets of stairs down — the thrill of getting away with something I shouldn't. Only, of course, this scenario is much more dire in scale. The thrill is appropriately amplified. I feel simultaneously calm and electrified. I wonder if any of it shows on my face. My leg won't stop bouncing. The briefcase jiggles.
Home. My apartment overlooks an orange river of plasma which originates from a leak in a tanker and was never repaired. The surface reflects rainbow whorls into the sky. I walk in at a normal place and triple lock my door behind me, throwing the briefcase on my sofa and deliberately walking past to the washroom.
I splash water on my face and adjust my sleeves. Some droplets get on my dress shirt. When I walk back to my living room, the briefcase sits ominously. Alluringly.
There are several options for what to do. One: dump the briefcase with the body into the harbor. Easiest way to get the corpse away from me, and water will wash away any evidence of my tampering. However, there's nothing to say the suitcase won't be easily found, and if it can be found, Hell can sniff out the owner; though I have some measure of plausible deniability that I killed him, I have no ability to deny that it is my briefcase. Everyone at work has seen.
Two: keep the briefcase here, don't open it. This method has historical precedent, actually — many years ago a famous entertainer, a drag performer and passionate advocate for inferno-syndicalism, had passed from a liver parasite; when looters gutted their apartment, a locked suitcase was found hidden in the back cache of their dressing room. Thinking they'd scored big, the looters broke the case open, only to find an unknown demon's skeleton preserved in thirty gallons of resin. Its origins are hotly debated — most believe that this was an ex-lover of the deceased's, killed in passion or self-defense, but more outlandish theories abound about the skeleton being alien in origin, or the deceased's secret child, or a half-formed reincarnation of a newborn god.
The main flaw with this course of action would be the nature of my cadaver, which was that of a devil's — an oxymoronic statement if I were to say it out loud. Devils do not die often, and when they do, they do not leave cadavers. Their essence immediately returns to the heart of Hell, where they are reconstituted in one of the many blood pools stationed at each Department. The presence of a cadaver at all is highly unprecedented. I have no idea if the usual rules of decomposition apply... God, and if the contract is still intact... What a mess it'd be if it were to be discovered.
Three: examine the body.
I stare at the briefcase. Lambskin, white with simple black trim; my most extravagant self-purchase. Until today, it never held anything other than pencils, paper, and a laptop. It takes me a while to reach for it, but eventually I do. I take it to my room.
My coworker's body parcels out cold and heavy in my hands, first the head, then the shoulders and torso, one leg then the other; I drag out one of my two dining chairs and seat him in it. It takes several tries to balance him.
He is an exceedingly average man, slightly heavyset, short-shorn hair and a heavy five o' clock shadow. His hair is auburn and his skin is a light, inhuman tone of lavender. He wears standard work attire in various shades of beige, not ostentatious nor ragged. His face has transitioned from its ghastly, half-open gape to an expression of nothing.
"Korandir" was what the voice on the phone called him. A strange name. It definitely couldn't be my coworker's real name, because I would have remembered something so outlandish. No, they must have been mistaken, or calling him by a nickname. Korandir. When the voice said it, it sounded familiar, warm with affection. Could it have been a wrong number? A prank call? Likely. But about as likely as it being a call targeted to him. Without further details, there's no way of knowing. Where can I get more information?
I pore through his pockets. Other than the ancient phone, which has no numbers or information saved on it, there is no identifying material — no wallet, no ID, no driver's license, not even a pin indicating his department of origin. How could he have gotten into the building in the first place? A puzzle.
I look him over for surface wounds. Quickly, I find one at the back of his head, a blossoming bruise around a deceptively shallow-looking cut, stained with the remnants of purple blood. It doesn't look like the sort of head wound which should be fatal, but it was directly at the intersection of skull and spine. I would wager this was a site of blunt force impact. I cursorily examine the rest of the body, but I see no other injuries on the uncovered skin.
That's all I think to find. I have two new pieces of information; a head wound and a mysterious phone call. I check the phone to see if I can redial the number, but it wasn't saved to the call history. It seems this brick phone was chosen to deliberately obscure as much of its own activity as possible. And that's all I gleaned from the body.
I look down at 'Korandir' again. I rack my brain trying to remember anything about him at all. We've worked together for decades. Surely I've retained something that speaks to his character. I don't remember ever having quarreled with him. He never had anything disagreeable about him. But he was never particularly upstanding either. The most outstanding impression I get when I recall his presence is an ever-present smile, mild and toothless, stretched across his face. It was an expression that put the other parties in the room at ease, not because it was comforting — rather, the vacancy of his expression gave one the sense that they weren't talking to a particularly sharp person. A soft, edgeless man with so little presence, you could forget he was in the room as you were speaking to him.
What else? Every break, he listened to his walkman. He had the same lunch every day, imitation turkey on rye bread, no condiments. It irritates me that the information about 'Korandir' I'm dredging up is so mundane, so useless.
Of course, the burner phone indicates some sort of unusual activity. What is the purpose of its presence? Clearly the person who called him knew him. 'Knew' is probably an understatement. Listening in on the message was uncomfortably intimate; it felt raw and private, an enigmatic lover's whispers. I shouldn't have listened to it, but I did. The words echo in my mind like a skipping tape recorder. I forgive you. I'll be at the dock. Waiting. The words had been affectionate, warm. Lilting with bitten-back laughter, for the tenderness of the moment. How could this man, whose name I do not remember, who probably is not even reported missing at the moment for how forgettable he is, gain someone who could say those words, I forgive you, with such delicate adoration? I look at him, trying to decipher the riddle.
He must have been someone special. To this person on the phone, at least.
The cadaver is not decomposed, nor does it give off any odor, which allows me an amount of proximity. For all his blandness, he is not unpleasant to look at. Perhaps he had some hidden charm saved for a life outside work, far away from the prying eyes of coworkers — if that were the case, I could understand. There are many aspects of myself I keep hidden from coworkers, not for any particular reason other than being reserved.
As an experiment, I place him on my mattress. His weight sinks the bedsheets down slightly. Resting atop silken sheets, he looks like he's sleeping... he lies supine, peaceful.
I find it surprisingly easy to lie next to him. My own lack of unease startles me, but then again, it is my apartment and my bed; I suppose my familiarity wins out above all else. It's not like I have any untoward intentions. I just want to be closer to understanding. What the phone lover saw in the late 'Korandir' that I, that no one else, seemingly can.
Perhaps he and 'Korandir' met over the phone. It's an easy mode of living, with our fourteen-hour work shifts and high-rise apartments. How often was it that they saw each other? Perhaps once a year, perhaps never. Tender kisses and warm embraces are supplemented with daily texts, video chats, long phone calls into the night of whispered, giggled conversation. Intimacy is easy to form in the absence of flesh, through imagination and photons alone.
Perhaps the phone call could be explained away as a lover's spat — they were going steady for four months, five, before it all imploded. A miscommunication, even an affair. Photon intimacy is ideal for this scenario. It compresses every complication into an electric tangibility, a few buttons pressed and they're gone from your life, your connection instantly severed. But the voice on the phone had sounded warm, not vindictive. On the verge of making up, then, maybe. Or on the tail end of it.
I imagine an apartment, not dissimilar from mine. Two rooms, a living space and a bedroom, affordable on the budget of a mid-ranking Department worker. Beige floors and cream wallpaper. Cream-colored fluttering curtains on an open window, redlight spilling through the glass. The enigmatic lover in bed, waiting for him. How does he look? I imagine him to be slim and put together; reading glasses, like mine, perhaps a hint of stubble. Soft, to match his voice. He pages through a book without reading it — the turning in of itself is a ritual of control. He is waiting for the late 'Korandir' to arrive so that he may dutifully forgive him, after the requisite devotion has been given. But he must be given it first.
The door swings open. In steps the late 'Korandir', holding his walkman and a bouquet of flowers, human-style. A sheepish smile adorns his stubbled face. He places the bouquet in a vase on a table and approaches the enigmatic lover from behind. The enigmatic lover turns another page, aware of each step the late 'Korandir' takes.
Korandir kneels at the foot of the bed. He looks up at his lover with liquid, dopey eyes the color of honey.
Forgive me, he says, smiling, I'm sorry. Forgive me.
The lover smiles.
I am brought out of my reverie by a loud thump on the other side of the room. I open my eyes.
Lifting my head, I see the body of the late 'Korandir' halfway across the room, facedown, being dragged by what looks like a preteen girl no older than 14. It seems she is trying to drag him out the window, and failing.
Her wan face goes paler as I make eye contact.
She bolts for the window. I am faster. I lift my hand and a jet of smoke emerges from my stigmata, clearing the room's distance in a single burst. It wraps around the window's bar and slams it shut so hard it splinters the glass, the girl howling as it rams straight down on her nose.
As she falls, writhing and clutching her face, I sit on the bed, wondering how a single day in a life of seven hundred years could be so much more eventful than the rest. In the distance alarms sound for a building on fire. The late 'Korandir''s body leers up at me with an impassive grin.
—
The kettle shrieks a long shrill note as I pour redwater into one of two mugs, the former of which reads "KNOW THE NAME OF YOUR GOD". My elephant-shaped clock ticks on the wall.
There are two strangers in my apartment. One rests prone on the floor of my closet where I shoved it hastily. The other sits on my remaining dining chair, the preteen intruder. She's lanky, concealed all around by a puffy pale yellow holographic coat, thick maroon boots several sizes too large for her, a lopsided blue knit beanie. She looks like a party popper, I think to myself (and do not verbalize). She is glowering at me through a thick handful of tissues, trying and failing to stem the steady flow of blood from her nose.
"Wuhhyugubbao," she mutters, which I eventually parse to mean, "What are you gonna do?" Her pale blue skin is flushed at the cheeks.
"I don't know," I answer truthfully, and push her a steaming mug of fresh tea. She eyes it as if I had given her a slab of rotten meat and asked her to take a bite. I take a sip from my own mug, which is slightly too hot and singes my tongue. I place my mug on the edge of the table.
We sit together in a long, protracted silence. She only stops glaring at me to dart her eyes around the room, seeking an escape that will not come. I have triple-locked the door, after all. She sniffles grotesquely, a sound full of liquid and broken cartilage that makes my eyelids water in sympathy.
"I'mb fucked," she mumbles, "I'mb totabbly fucked."
I look at the floor, not knowing what to say. I wonder if I should assuage her — I don't really have any intentions of getting her into trouble, but I also don't know what she's doing here. More than anything I need to know if she's affiliated with Hell, because if that's the case, I'm already dead.
I stir my tea. "Are you here on behalf of my department?"
She gives me a dumbfounded look. "Bno. Why would I be." She sniffles again. It seems to clear up some of the backed up gunk in her throat.
"I would have been surprised, but I must ask." She sinks further in her seat. In her oversized coat she looks tiny and miserable. "How did you get into my apartment?"
"Your window was unlocked. You looked like you were asleep." She shoots me an accusatory look. "Lying next to it. What were you even doing? Are you some sort of— of— necro-lover freak?"
"I am nothing of the sort," I calmly reply.
The look in the girl's eyes tells me she doesn't really believe me.
"Can I know your name at least?" She looks at me with yellow eyes wide with fear. "It's the least you owe me. For the window."
She hesitates and gives me a suspicious squint. "Marla Martinez."
It reads as a very human name to me. I don't question it much — people are named all sorts of strange things these days. "Well, Marla. Can you tell me what you're doing here?' She shrinks further down with every question. "Why were you trying to tamper with the body of my coworker?"
With that, she bursts into ugly, gasping tears. I stare at her, then redirect my gaze about a foot left of her.
"It wasn't supposed to— to happen like this!" Her face and eyes are screwed up with pain, from her ruined nose and her anguish. "How could it all have gotten so fucked up?! Fuck. Fuck."
She curls up in her seat and buries her face into her knees, letting out a wail of despair. I worry that the sound will bleed through the walls and shift in my seat uncomfortably.
Eventually she settles down, hiccuping and rocking in her chair.
"He wasn't meant to die," she says miserably. "We were supposed to keep a tracker on him, see where he was going to go. Get an in. I— I have no idea what happened to him... found him dead in that stupid shitty office and didn't know what to do. So I put him in the locker."
Furiously, she adds, "You weren't supposed to find him! You— stupid weird necro fuck. Fuck! Fuck."
I wait until she's stopped muttering obscenities to reply. "Who's 'we'?"
"The IACC." When I look at her blankly, she clarifies, a little annoyed, "The Inferno-Anarcho-Communist Coalition. You haven't heard of us?"
"I have not."
"It's not a secret," she says, apropos of nothing.
Not what I said, I think.
"Are you gonna turn me in?" she says, snapping her eyes at me angrily. "Turn me over to the pigs?"
"No," I say. Not yet, anyway.
She startles. "Why?"
I hold up the phone. "I need to figure out who called him. And what his name was."
She stares at me, dumbfounded.
"I'm about as dead as you, otherwise."
The elephant clock dings. It's 5:4420:8008.