Golgotha

Another short story.

            At seven fourteen P.M. the first man to ever come back from the dead after an extended period was interviewed on the scene. A mother and daughter, laying bundles of blue chrysanthemums and black tulips on the grave of their recently deceased mother and grandmother, had watched in terror as a man crawled out of the May-warmed earth, white suit smoking at the shoulders and hem and caked in clay and topsoil. Blue embalming fluid mixed with the dark red of fresh blood poured from under his clothes and soaked into the earth, the way someone freshly drenched in a bucket of water might shed the water. They had immediately called the police and the Channel 5 news.

            “My name is Charles Hubert Griswold. I am fifty-one years old, a neurochemist, and I have returned from hell.”

            It made every headline. In a fit of jealousy, Iran declared nuclear war on North Korea and nobody even showed up to watch. In the crowd at the first press conference stood Quentin Looper, a chemistry student and student journalist. Charles Griswold sat, clothed in a less sulfurous outfit, and explained the process.

            “I have been addicted to chemical substances since I was eighteen, and my career fed my dependence through easy access to the most potent, concentrated chemicals known to man.”

            The crowd of nearly a thousand, as one, ceased all sound until they nearly absorbed it. A crying child was roundly slapped. The sound engineer turned up the PA.

            “In my studies, I’ve found that the more pleasurable an experience is, the more destruction it causes to the brain. A single beer can kill thousands of brain cells. Narcotics such as cocaine and methamphetamine can kill millions per use. Autoerotic asphyxiation, coupled with orgasm, can caused permanent brain damage. After years of substance abuse, trapped in a well-paying but incredibly dull and joyless job, I decided to kill myself. Not in the way that one normally might: by hanging, a pistol shot, or drowning.  Instead, I decided to create a concoction of the quickest acting, deadliest poisons I could acquire.”

            Quentin felt himself tensing. This had a point. The man had obviously arisen from the grave, christlike, after forty one days. On stage, the recently-dead man crossed his legs, leaning back in the chair. The mic rustled against his lapel. The room smelled sweaty.

            “I assembled an injection of brodifacoum, batrochotoxin, botulinum, and tempered this with the pain-suppressant qualities of hyper-concentrated tetrahydrocannabinol, the high from cannabis. This injection, at one point five microliters, was injected into my femoral artery at one fifty seven a.m. At one fifty eight a.m., I died.” Griswold leaned over, sipped from a glass of water sitting on a nightstand next to his chair. “That one minute—less than that, actually—began the most incredible high of my entire life. Every muscle in my body clenched and relaxed as one. I orgasmed, I hemorrhaged, I bled, I died. That one minute felt like hours, like it would never end. If a single orgasm were a candle, this was a supernova, the implosion of a supercritical black hole. I have never felt anything like it.

            “I awoke in Hell. This was not the Hell of which you have been told. It was a grassy meadow, dotted with pampas grass and leaning trees. To the north, a deep valley carved into the mountains held the most luxurious, inhabitable rainforest unlike any that could grow on earth. A brook ran nearby, the air smelled of animals, of fresh open air. I was alone in Eden.

            “I wandered the plains and jungles for several years, building myself a home. I never saw another person. My yurt was safe and cozy. During the long nights I would lay in the grass and listen to the jackals giggle in the distance, letting the long sky spin overhead. Finally, one day the solitude grew too much. I found a tree, wove a strong rope from leather I had tanned, and hung myself. The pain was intense, but tolerable. I awoke to find myself back in my body, in a coffin. I felt invincible, indestructible. I didn’t breathe, because I didn’t need to. My hands swam through the earth as though I were stirring loose flour. The concrete of my vault gave way like gingerbread. And now, this is where I am. I plan to kill myself again, using the same mixture, and return to the peace of Hell, or what I should like to rename Griswold’s Plain.”

            The mixture was suddenly and circumspectly patented. Experienced professionals bought substantial quantities of the virulent poison and opened shops along major interstates. Not just the weary and heavy-burdened sought solace, but young and old, happy and sad, came to the shops for their dose. A new type of graveyard was created: corrugated steel longhouses filled with refrigerated drawers where sleeping corpses were interred after their dose of the drug, commonly called Golgotha. A glowing blue button installed in the side of the drawer allowed the newly awoken to eject himself from the drawer like lettuce arising from the crisper.

            On average, thirty percent of the dead decided to return. The high was so potent, so ardently and rapturously received and evangelized that before any government could enact regulation a good half of their population had voluntarily self-annihilated.

            Quentin himself avoided Golgotha. A few of his braver classmates either took the injection as an experiment or tried a riskier, but less permanent method and distilled the drug into crystals that were then vaporized in special lounges. The fumes induced months-long comas that were cured by time and a careful drip of antitoxins.

            Christmas, seven months after the initial appearance of Griswold, Quentin’s mother gave him a gift certificate entitling him to a dose of Golgotha.

            “You’re young, honey. It’s okay to be a little foolish. You have the rest of your life to be responsible. Do something crazy.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Think of it as a late graduation present.”

Uneasy, but unwilling to waste a gift certificate (I mean, he practically had to) Quentin got his body storage in order with the certificate, went down the nearest Boneshop, and after stripping down to a pair of absorbent underwear, settled into the comfortable reclining chair. A latticed drain was set into the seat, recessed in the soft black leather padded manacles on the arms of the warmed chair opened for Quentin’s wrists. A technician sat in a rolling office chair next to him, snapping a surgical mask over his mouth.

            “How’s it going, buddy?”

            Quentin stared up and into the oval ring of the muted surgical light hanging over his chest. “Okay.”

            “Relax, it’ll be fun. We’ll immediately take your body to the storage facility. From recalled maps of Griswold’s Plain, there is going to be a hot spring in a cave about two miles south of where you’ll wake up. In the hot spring are some long stalagmites. Simply throw yourself onto those when you’re done relaxing and you’ll return. The average time exchange rate is one year there for every day here. Your certificate is good for one week, so you need to leave the plain by six years and three hundred sixty-four days. We clear?”

            “Yes sir.” Quentin was trying to keep this clear. “Will I remember this when I wake up there?”

            The technician was drawing a milky substance into a slender syringe. He was wearing teflon hazmat gloves. “No worries,” he said, somewhat distantly. “This will cause a tiny sting, and then the ride, and then the vacay. If you don’t come back, we cremate your remains. Since no one has come back from cremation, we aren’t sure what happens, but we believe that your consciousness ceases to exist; basically you die for real. You good?”

            Quentin nodded. A glass shield dropped between Quentin and the tech, and the guy stuck his arms through holes in the glass, still gloved. “Hold still.”

            It went on for years. Unending, impossible pleasure. Unadulterated joy coursed like insanity through every fiber of Quentin’s existence. It was sleeping in late on the first day of summer; it was a five-beer buzz floating on a still lake; it was every orgasm rolled into one; it was the first bite of a cinnamon roll; it was fire and pleasure and profound satisfaction and love and contentment and peace.

           

            For nearly seven years, Quentin was wild. He was an animal. He wore no clothes, spent his time rolling in the grass, shitting where he pleased, slurping lukewarm water from standing pools. His home was a nest he built in the trees, his television was the gemlike beetles skating across the tumbled surface of the stream. He ate firm, sweet, luminescently colorful fruits in blue and violet, orange and green and pink and scarlet from the rich rainforests to the north, swung in a hammock of soft vines while the jungle sang him to sleep. During the day he splashed in lagoons like liquid diamond, lost himself in the misty roar of waterfalls, lounged in the cool of moist-smelling mossy caves. No thorns existed to step on, predators stalked past without heed.

            After six years and eleven months, Quentin reluctantly plucked a staff of hardwood from the rainforest and trekked through the jungle to the plains, and then further to the tiny quarry where the mouth of the return cave lay. Inside was uncomfortably hot, and sticky sweat ran in rivulets down Quentin’s bare back and shoulders. At the end of a short walk lay the open mouth of a pit, so dark it might have ben a pool of shadow. Steeling himself, Quentin worked up his nerve and flung himself into the darkness. Spikes of hot stone shredded his body. Pain screamed through every pore in his body. A blade of stone had gone through his throat, and Quentin couldn’t scream. He kicked helplessly.

            He awoke suddenly in his drawer. It was quiet and cool, the steel was icy against his back. Quentin wriggled, suddenly uncomfortable in his nudity, and reached for the button. His newly awakened nerves missed the button, smashing a huge dent in the steel wall. Quentin retracted his hand and delicately pressed the button, cracking the blue face. The drawer popped open like a bagel from a toaster, dumping Quentin onto the ground and back into his life.

            School wasn’t the same. Joy wasn’t the same. The taxi drive back to his mother’s house tore at Quentin. Colors seemed dim. Clothes itched on his back, his eyes hurt from the harsh light. When he stalked into the foyer of his mother’s home, her surprised-happy yelp did nothing to shake him from the mood. He stomped to his room and lay on his rough comforter on the bed, staring at the blank white ceiling, seething.

            Three jobs; ninety hours a week, Quentin saved his money for a longer stay. It was two thousand dollars a week to stay in a storage facility, and if he set it up just right, Quentin thought, he could have an interest bearing trust fund that would keep his body stored and totally safe to let him be free for one year, earth time. That’s 364 years, Hell-time. After saving enough money in two long years, Quentin kissed his mother goodbye, jumped in a taxi, and strutted into the Boneshop on southern sixty third.

            “I need Golgotha, please.”

            “One dose? It’ll be a minute.” The tech disappeared into the back wearing a clean blue smock, returned fifteen minutes later bundling the filthy paper into a plastic Ziploc emblazoned with a bright orange skull, and glanced at Quentin.

            “Initital dose is three thousand, plus two thousand per week.”

            Quentin filled out the paperwork, wrote the check for one hundred and seven thousand dollars, and laid back in the chair. The needle took him, the trip was again immense, and he awoke in another place.

            This was not the plain. It was a canyon. The earthy redness of the walls created fear unlike that that Quentin had ever felt. In the distance, something howled, lonely and hungry. Quentin began to run, and whatever was in the distance heard his bare feet slipping against the rocky floor of the canyon. Sulfurous black water splashed underfoot as Quentin fled. Something hulking, stinking, covered in matted black fur appeared at the neck of the canyon ahead. Quentin turned to flee but it was already too late. Hot fangs sank into his neck.

            Quentin awoke, still in the chair. Covered in his own excrement, semen, piss. The surprised tech had barely withdrawn the needle.

            “Bad trip?” He asked.

            Quentin nodded wordlessly, then, “let me go again, please.”

            “Since it was a bad trip I’m entitled to give you a second free dose. Lay back.”

            The trip, less intense this time, perhaps because Quentin was used to it. He awoke in a black stone cavern. The smell of carrion and rotting garbage floated through the hot, damp air. Quentin dashed down the hall, urgently, desperately, trying to find the paradise he had spent so many years in. The tunnel opened into a huge pit, so far across the other side was hard to see. Above, there was no sky, just more black stone, more stench. Quentin’s feet began to burn, as though he were walking across a hot tarmac in July. Desperate to escape, Quentin leapt into the blackness of the pit and awoke in the chair.

            “Damn, buddy. What’s going on?” The tech had halfway lifted Quentin onto a gurney when he awoke.

            “It’s not where I was the last time.”

            “Well, no one else came back from a second trip.”

            “Let me go again, please.” Quentin felt a sob rising in his throat. His stomach felt acidic. Where was he going? Where was the plain? For an instant, he considered staying in the real world, but stopped himself. Another instant of misery in this gray and bland world, away from his personal paradise, was inconceivable.

            The tech came back in the room with a suited manager. The guy sat by Quentin’s side, ignoring the filth that caked Quentin’s pale body. “What’s going on?”
            After explaining it, and a long conversation on the phone with someone from corporate (“yeah, uh-huh, yeah, sure. Okay, thanks Jan. I’ll let him know) the man smiled and let Quentin know that he was free to have one more dose. “If this one doesn’t take, I’m afraid that we’ll give you a refund and admit that it’s not working any more.”

            Quentin dove into the pleasure, seeking respite, seeking his peace. He awoke suspended in the air. His skin burned, heavy chains wrapped around his wrists, weighing him down. Quentin sobbed, was sick across his chest, and then began to stumble, dragging the heavy iron chains through a long hallway. The rough floor was like walking on a skillet, shrieking noises assaulted him from all angles. Quentin stumbled miserably through a door to see an ocean of lava. Floating twenty feet out on the ocean was a cleaver. With something like laughter Quentin dove into the lava. The pain was extreme, tearing at him. It was hard to see, impossible to breathe. After wading chest deep through the molten stone, Quentin seized the blade and slashed his throat to leave. The pain was there, coupled with the roaring blaze that slowly devoured his mind, but when he raised his hand to his throat, the gash sealed itself bloodlessly. Quentin tried again, desperately, but the gash, though mind-numbingly painful, sealed again. Enraged, desperate, sobbing in pain and fear, Quentin slashed every artery in his body. Blood gushed into the fire, steaming in pungent jets. The cuts sealed. Unable to take the agony, Quentin turned to leave and was unable to move. The chains held him back, locking him into place. Quentin, weary, sank into the lava, unable to fight any more.