A Short Stay in Hell Read Online Free PDF Page B

through more books in hopes
of finding our story and then, after noting the consistent sea of
random text, tirelessly heaved them over the side. It was getting
discouraging. I had not found even a single sentence that made
sense.
    However, a few days later, Biscuit started
dancing and shouting with joy. He called us over and we all looked
in envy when he showed us he had found something that made sense.
It was the phrase “sack it.”
    “What does it mean?” Sam asked. (Sam was a
short, quiet young man, who had formed a sort of clique with
Elliott, Larisa, Biscuit, Dolores, and me.)
    Biscuit looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure.
Let’s see, a sack is something you use to carry something in. Maybe
it means I’m going to go somewhere soon and will need a sack.”
    “What makes you think it means anything …” I
started to say, but I looked at Biscuit and he had begun to cry,
then sob. Tears slid down his cheeks, and he smiled at us, nodding
his head as if affirming something we could not understand. We all
were a little surprised. Dolores softly put her arm around him, and
he turned to hug her as he continued to weep.
    “I’m sorry,” he said through his tears, “it’s
just that …” He broke off, then said, “When I was alive, I …”
Finally, after another bout of weeping, he steadied himself,
laughed at himself, and started again. “When I was alive on earth,
as you know, I was homeless and chronically mentally ill. I had an
old green army laundry bag that I carried everything in. It was a
sack that held everything I owned. A couple of times at night I’ve
woken up reaching for it like I used to. It was my most prized
possession. I carried that sack for twenty-three years, until one
day the bottom fell out. I couldn’t let it go even then. I
hitchhiked to the Vietnam memorial and placed it on the monument
right above a friend’s name.”
    There was a moment of silence as we
considered this.
    “You were in Nam?” Elliott asked. Biscuit
just nodded.
    “I was in the South Pacific in WWII. If you
ask me that was more of a Hell than this giant bookshelf.”
    Dolores began telling a rather silly story of
how a sack was significant in her life when she had carried one
from an exclusive department store with her to school and one of
the cool girls had been jealous and she and her friends had
laughingly ripped it to smithereens.
    Within a few minutes we all found meaningful,
or terrible, stories about sacks in our lives. I even shared a
story about a sack I threw away at Christmastime with a fifty
dollar check in it.
    Biscuit, though, took it as a sign that all
would be well. And Dolores as a sign of comfort and hope.
    To be honest, I thought it was just a random
word, but I didn’t say anything to the others. They seemed
particularly moved by Biscuit’s story. He held on to the book all
that day and took it to bed with him that night. Sure enough,
because he’d held on to it, the book wasn’t returned to its place
on the shelf in the morning. It was still in his arms when he woke
up. All the rest of the week he carried it with him, much like the
sack he once loved so much. After two days, he found even more
meaning in the word. It turned out that “sack” was on page 345, on
line 21. Which if you reverse the 21 makes 1 2 3 4 5 backward –
sort of. The word “sack” was found starting on letter 27 of the
line and ending on letter 30. Which are both divisible by 3, which
if you multiply by the 2 and the 7 in 27 respectively, gives you 6
and 21. Now, since you still need to get a single digit, you divide
the 21 by 3, which gives you 7 back, so now not only do you have 1
2 3 4 5, you have 6 and 7. Now go back to the 27 and divide by 3,
so you get 9, and divide the 30 by 3, and you get what? 10. So then
you have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10.
    “Now,” says Biscuit, “take the three and the
zero in thirty and add them together, and you get three, which
added to the last number in the first chain you found, which