That’s the bad news. The
good news is, here’s an escape plan. It’s a long shot, but follow these tips
and you might crawl your way to purgatory. As one of the three people who read The Divine Comedy past The Inferno, let me tell you, it doesn’t
get much better. Dante’s still punishing people up until the third circle of
heaven. Then it gets nice! Follow the tips!
Abandon Hope
It’s hell.
Personally,
if I were designing the place, I’d trick everyone into thinking it was heaven
for the first hundred years. You’re all dancing and having angel orgies in a
field made of cake, and then, a hundred years in, you hear the buzz of a fly.
That’s it. Every couple years or so it comes back, just enough to make you look
at John Lennon (and you thought he’d gotten over imagining no heaven!) and go
“What the hell was that?” Every time it happens the word “hell” hangs in the
air a tiny bit more, but everyone keeps laughing and smiling because no one
wants to admit what’s happening, until one year the flies are all over the
place, and the slightest discomfort begins, and slowly, over the course of a
thousand years, what started as an angel orgy becomes a grinding labor of raw,
chafing misery. Now that’s long-term punishment!
Every
account I’ve read doesn’t show that imagination. It’s obvious what’s going on: you’re
there and it hurts. No last-minute prayer, no protest. Running away won’t save
you now. You’ve been sentenced. God will show no mercy for your soul. Abandon
hope.
Never Give Up
Still,
everything suggests that the massive torture chamber that is hell wasn’t
designed for this many people. What kind of God would put us through the misery
that is life just to torture us forever in the afterworld? It doesn’t even make
sense for an evil God. He’d just cut to the chase. No, they really did expect
us to follow all the rules. God wanted us to stop worshiping graven images and
coveting and killing and messing around. I think we must have overwhelmed the
system with our capacity to ignore warnings and plunge on with our sinning. An
overwhelmed system is an exploitable system.
Don’t Despair
Whatever
you do, don’t kill yourself. You might think that you’ll rematerialize
somewhere better, but remember, you might just be having a bad acid trip and
think you’re in hell. That’s a good thing to check into. For instance, just
prior to going to hell, did you ingest a large quantity of psychedelic
mushrooms? As John Lennon’s face goes from groovy to miserable over the course
of a thousand years, does it still look like that Let It Be poster on your wall? Dude, you’re not in hell, you’re
tripping. Drink some water and eat some ice cream. You’ll be fine in a couple
hours. Then you’ll live a full life, never do drugs again, and eventually die
and go to hell.
Get to Work
I bet the
demons are exhausted, pulling extra shifts and double duties, and they can’t
watch us all the time. Now, if you’re in hell, there have got to be sharp
objects to cut through ropes or pick locks. You’ve got eternity. After some
trial and error, you can get free.
Now sneak
into a hospital. Those places are loaded with closets full of hospital scrubs
and loose ID badges. Pretend to be a doctor, and wait until they send out the
ambulances, and ride out in one into the upper world. They’re probably helping
a demon who's out in the world collecting lost souls. Wait until they get to a
traffic light, jump out and run.
Prepare for the Non-Hospital-Hell
Scenario
It’s
conceivable that they don’t have hospitals in hell. I would think that with all
the fires and sharp objects, there would be a high risk of accidents and they
would have at least one, but I could be wrong.
Explore the
possibility of janitors’closets, security guards’ offices, and restaurants.
Janitors and security guards don’t have great mobility, but you can say “Wow,
this is gonna be a mess!” or just mumble into a walkie talkie and bluff your
way through many situations. If there’s a restaurant, you can say you’ll wait
at the bar, then slip into the kitchen, grab an apron, and presto! You’re a
caterer. Grab a tray of sandwiches and just say some bigwig up top needs his lunch
pronto! That’s right, I’m using presto and pronto in the same paragraph! I
don’t care.
If they
don’t have anything like that, I’d just grab a couple pointy things, jam them
into your head and pretend to be a demon. Then start casing the joint. Look
behind bushes. Any secret passageways? Any cracks in the rocks that look a hair
too thick and symmetrical? Maybe that cactus is a lever that activates a secret
trapdoor? It’ll probably work the way it does at Disneyland.
If anyone
tries to stop you, just get in their face and say “Get out of the way! Der Führer
wanted area cleared hours ago! Do you want to make Der Führer angry?!” They’ll
probably run away, knees knocking, but maybe they’ll tear you to pieces. Keep
trying different angles. Maybe Lucifer’s the big scary guy there. You probably
should have tried that first.
Get the Hell Out of Hell
Dante got
through hell by going down to the bottom, frozen ring. It also makes sense in
that up-is-down kind of way. Still, my gut is telling me to ignore sexually
frustrated Italians and to counterintuit counterintuitiveness. Go up! You’re
down in a pit. Up is out! Climb! There’s got to be tunnels or elevators or
something. Don’t give up hope!
Abandon Hope
So you’re
in hell. What the hell? Why not go with the flow, even if the flow is a river
of fire? Find yourself the nicest corner. See if anyone wants to start a demon
orgy. Get
a hell-bound romance going. Start selling candy bars to the guards. If
you’re doomed to an eternity of torture, you might as well make the most of it.
Remember,
this might just be the last test. If I were designing heaven, I’d make everyone
think they’d been sent to hell, then throw a surprise party. It’d make everyone
feel so grateful not to be in hell you could skimp on frosting for the cake
fields. So maybe that’s what’s going on. Don’t lose hope! Yes, it’s
triple-counterintuitive. That’s the only mindset you can have if you’re trapped
in hell.
--Dan Kilian
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