A novel by Guy Uri
One HELL of an Adventure
MARCUS MORUS SYNDROME
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🚨 Warning! This page contains some spoilers from the novel ⚠️
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Welcome To Hell!
A few more people had a crappy week—the place was packed. The lights were already off, and on a wide stage stood a large man with silver hair behind a lecturer's stand, his big and weird head adorned with a partial beard that suited the insane. His fingers drummed on the surface of the stand. He was dressed in a white suit and tie, and next to him on the stage sat another man and a woman, both also in white suits.
I sat at the end of the row, and when the noise in the aisles ceased, the bearded man approached the microphone:
“Good morning and welcome to Hell!” he began, smiling and spreading his arms to the sides.
A collective discomfort emanated from the audience.
“Scary, isn't it?” continued the man. “Hell! What a dramatic word! So let's not define it that way. Let's call our world exactly what it is—our current world.”
I surveyed my current world and saw hundreds of shining bald heads staring at the suited man like moonstruck lunatics, a sea of lonely souls ... I wondered for a moment what the story was with this creature, then closed my eyes and sank into the seat. I tried to imagine the feel of Karen’s nails scratching my back, piercing through the skin…
A trip to Heaven
A few silent and gloomy minutes later, the carriages stopped in front of a barrier behind which stood a high fence with coiled barbed wire. A young, athletic blond man in white uniform, who looked like a Dolce & Gabbana model or one of those Sebastian Apollo impersonators, emerged from the other side of the barrier, holding a clipboard. He approached the carriage, exchanged salutes and calls of “In God We Trust” with Seven, whispered into a walkie-talkie, and then returned to the other side of the fence. After a few seconds, the barrier lifted and the carriages started moving again. On the side of the road stood a sign, “Welcome to P City.” Fences are a strange thing, and I tried to figure out if I was leaving a fenced-in area or entering a new one. They say the neighbor's grass always looks greener, and this saying is especially true when you have no grass at all. Beyond the fence, the yellowish soil was replaced by manicured lawns and green hills, wispy feathery clouds floated above us, and even Mariana's face showed something that could be interpreted as a smile. “The budgets they have,” Eisen complained. “I went over the data a few days ago and it simply blew my mind.” “All this green is wonderful,” Seven noted. “I hope one day we can invest in parks and green lungs in our place too.” He turned to Mariana again and said, “Well—your efforts have been rewarded!” Mariana smiled weakly at him, and suddenly she seemed to me like a mental patient who had arrived at a convalescent care facility.
The abyss
I went to the door, peeked into the hallway, and didn't see any sign of Duce, or Stanley, or anyone else. I went back inside and looked down from the window again. I thought that maybe I really had nothing to lose—except the appeal, every bone in my body, and another reincarnation of some kind. I grabbed the wall and placed my foot on the windowsill. Then I lifted my other leg and sat on the iron frame, my legs dangling outside. A strong wind hit me, and for a moment, I feared I would fly with it into the abyss. I kind of enjoyed that thought; the fear made me feel almost alive. I looked at the sky. I didn't see any birds, only black clouds above the Tower of Paradise. I wondered if the seasons also change in the afterlife, if there are storms and heatwaves and blooms and falls in hell, and I asked myself if I could die again and how would it feel to jump, how the way down would feel. What would I think about in those moments? How long would it take? Is there a chance I'll have a heart attack before I even hit the ground?
The chess game
“Browns or whites?” Stanley asked, pointing to the pieces. “Browns. Their color is more fitting for my life right now.” He smiled, though I'm not sure he understood, and started arranging the pieces on the board. I remembered my parents once sent me to a chess club at the community center. I wasn't a great success. “Are you familiar with Black openings?” Stanley asked. “There's a Black opening named after me,” I said. “Cohen's Bunker.” “A bunker is not a winning strategy in chess, my friend.” “You'll see soon enough,” I assured him. He opened aggressively, and after a few moves, I lost two pawns compared to his one. “Just like in life,” he said, “the simple soldiers go first.” “Who cares about them,” I hissed. We had barely started, and Stanley had swiftly and efficiently taken control of the center of the board. A few more moves and his pawns and knights were in my backyard, his bishops were firing on dominant diagonals, one of his rooks stood on an open file, and even his queen started showing off. When I brought out my queen, he chased her square after square. I was struggling to gain any momentum. “When you deal only with your queen too early you abandon the other pieces,” he said and slashed one of my boys. A game of cat and mouse developed, needless to say who was the mouse, and then, suddenly, as a result of what I thought was arrogance, contempt, or senility, I managed to take down his rook without sacrificing my bishop for it. I felt good, like Rocky coming back from the ropes when everything seemed doomed. “Thanks for the rook, Stan!” I said, quickly removing the piece from the board. “It's not like it's the second most powerful piece in the game, or anything.” Stanley looked at me and smiled wickedly. “You really should have castled,” he said, hopping with a knight and declaring check: “Check!” he declared. It wasn't just a check. It was a fork—a nasty tactic that forced me to move my king but lose my queen. And without the queen, I felt like Hannibal after he lost his elephants. Hannibal had nothing to sell without the elephants. Hannibal wouldn't even be famous without the elephants. The game was over, and within five or six moves, my fat and rotten king was caught with his pants down and his dick in his mouth. Not a regal sight.
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The experiment
“Soon you will be transferred to the alternate reality”, professor Watson said. “As if that unfortunate evening never happened, and your life continued as usual.” “For how long?” “About two hours in Earth time.” “And what am I going to do there?” “What do you mean?” “Do you know what's going to happen to me? Where am I going to end up?” “No. It's your life, Cohen, not mine.” “But what status am I putting on?” I pressed. “Alive? Dead? What?” “What does it matter to you so much?” “What does it matter to me so much?!!”, I snapped. “What could matter to me more?!” “Don't you understand yet that these simplistic definitions are not suitable for the magnitude of this tremendous scientific achievement, which you have been privileged to be a part of?” “No!” I shouted. “I don't understand anything! And fuck this tremendous achievement! Don't forget that you killed me for nothing!” He leaned back in his chair, shook his head impatiently, leaned forward again, and fixed his condescending gaze on me. “Mr. Cohen—do you know how many years it takes for poor Pluto to orbit the sun once, yet for him all those years are still one year and no more?” “What?” “Have you ever delved into the phenomenon of gravity? Do you know how long it takes for a shooting star to fall?” “What...” “To you, it seems like three seconds—and whoosh—it falls, but if you were sitting now on a shooting star, in a beach chair and sunglasses and no shirt on, it would seem to you that you were falling for a lifetime. Do you know what is happening and what isn't, what is good and what is bad, what is true and what is false? One day you lived, and you thought that one hour was sixty minutes and that one day passes with so many hours, and today you don't even know what a minute is—which from your perspective can stretch for nine thousand crappy hours. One day you drove around the block unable to find a piece of crooked sidewalk to put your car in, and you thought it could never get any worse. You had vacations and hours to sleep, and hours to get up and hours to see the sun, and an hour to do your homework and be a pure soul without a single bad thought, and an hour to admire something as natural as long legs of girls, and once in a hundred years you could see a stupid solar eclipse, and you thought you were so lucky to have seen a stupid solar eclipse at all. You had birthdays to be happy and mourning days to be sad, and years to be a child and years to be a soldier and years to study for your future—but only twenty-something years ago you were a marginal sperm with no face and no understanding, and without air and with zero chances for any future, and with tons of genes and DNA sequences that you could never change and that you were destined to live with—and now you want to understand matters in the height of the world? I assume that even now you don't even understand how the telegraph works, or the telephone, or even a small and simple thing like a carrier pigeon—and now you expect to understand everything that science has understood through thousands of years of intense, diligent and tiring observation, which still has almost nothing to contribute to us about this existence?!” “Yes.”
The trauma
Now I'm a child, maybe 6 or 7 years old, at my parents' house, it's the middle of the night and I wake up in a panic from my father's screams at the other end of the corridor... He screams and cries in his sleep, from the delusion, from the past, from the memory, from the trauma, from his private hell, from the burning tank, bodies of dead soldiers around him, bleeding bodies, burned bodies, bodies divided into two and three and four pieces, a head that once belonged to someone rolling next to him, the burning smell of flesh and alloy and gunpowder, shells falling around, burning trees, snowy peaks on the horizon and he lies there in a field of ash and sulfur, whole, unable to move, in his own urine and vomit, sure that the end will come at any moment, all he has left is the scream, the fear, the horror... I lie in the dark in bed, hugging a cowboy teddy bear, my eyes fixed on the plastic moon hanging from the ceiling... I don't know why he screams, why he suffers from nightmares, I have no idea what happened to him on Planet Lebanon, 15 years before I was born. Only many years later did I understand that every generation carries its disasters, its failed leaders and generals, its lost wars, its open wound, and no matter how many locks you put on the box with the demons you stuck in the attic—they always stay there, inside your head, in your subconscious, in your soul, they are already a part of you and they will always be a part of you, like a scar on the inside of the skin that only you can see, that only you can feel, that only you can scratch. I get out of bed and peek through the open door of the bedroom... He lies awake in bed, crying, my mother stroking his bald head until he calms down, like an overgrown baby who needs a little touch, a little warmth, a little love. It seems to me that she is crying too.
The basements
“Duce asked me to prepare some equipment for you, but I think you need something extra for self-defense. The situation downstairs is unstable, they've removed most of the security. Do you know how to use a gun?” I stared at him, wondering where the hell I was about to walk into. Duce said nothing about guns. “Yeah,” I said. “I shot a gun on ce. But it was a long time ago, in the army, and only at shooting ranges.” “What army were you in?” the African asked. “IDF. The Israeli army.” He whistled in admiration. “That's quite an army, from what they say!” “An army of idiots,” I said dismissively. He looked at me with a surprised expression. “I understand Israel is a very small country, with no strategic depth, limited in resources and manpower, surrounded by enemies—but it still manages to win all its wars!” “Yes,” I nodded. “We're lucky our enemies are complete infantiles.” “Oh, I see.” “Why do I need a gun?” I wondered. “Can I kill someone with it? I thought you couldn't die again.” “Yes... look, in the basements you can basically die again,” said the African, opening a drawer and placing on the table a short-barreled revolver that looked like a prop from a Spaghetti Western set or maybe like a Purim toy. The grip was wrapped in black electrical tape. “What do you mean—basically, you can die again?” I asked. “In the basements, it’s possible to die again,” the African clarified. “Can I die again, too?” “It’s an option,” the African nodded.
The operations
For the rest of the day, I didn't function better than usual. We sat in the office, Duce doing his thing and dismissing me from all the tasks, and I just sat there looking at him, almost hating him, feeling so heavy, thinking how nice it could have been to have a different mentor, one who understands a little bit about being chill. He kept talking more and more about the plan and the basements, more than anyone had ever talked about anything. He was discreet, although he tended to talk loudly, shouting at times, occasionally banging on the table and throwing metal objects at the glass walls. At least thirty-two different operatives peeked through the partition separating the office from the rest of the world at various times of the day. They looked curious, moving behind the glass like a group of aliens sent on a data-gathering mission. They seemed like nice people, and I wondered why I still didn't have any friends from Operations. I blamed Duce in my heart. I concluded that I could blame Duce for everything that happened to me.
The airport
In this dream, I was in the best place in Israel—Ben Gurion International Airport—dressed in tailored pants, a white shirt, a dark jacket, and a blue driver's cap, holding a sign that read “Mr. Motty Moris”. The arrivals board showed 04:27 in the morning, and what was strange were the origins of the flights—Kinshasa, Kampala, Tegucigalpa, Dushanbe, Asmara, Port Moresby, Ashgabat, Yangon, Monrovia—not to mention the later flights, all sorts of Mogadishu, Khartoum, Pyongyang, Karachi, Damascus, and Kabul—destinations like those for BBC war correspondents who get in trouble with the authorities, end up in the local jail, and only get out after the UN Secretary-General intervenes, with cigarette burns on their foreheads. In any case, tons of people came out of the terminal, as if there were no Amsterdam, New York, or Rome in the world, and every face that emerged was someone from my past, but none of them recognized me, knew me, approached me, and I didn't feel any such need either, even though I recognized them all. My parents, Ari, and his American wife and their children, and Karen, and all the friends and girlfriends and friends-with- benefits acquaintances I had in my life, and the stingy owner of the hotel and my dealer and the psychiatrist who once claimed I suffered from dysthymia—they all passed by me as if I were a ghost. Only my sister Dana was missing, probably still stoned in Australia. And then he emerged, five foot seven of scum, in a cheap suit that was at least one size too small on him, and for a moment, the whole fucking world froze. The noise stopped, a beam of light followed him, and he moved in slow motion with his trolley toward me, noticing the sign I was holding, being led by me to a black limousine. I put his Samsonite in the trunk, ask how the flight was, offer a cigarette from a Dunhill pack with gold foil and the mini-bar treats, update him on what's happening in the country, inform him that the dollar has dropped by three-tenths of a percent. And Motty Moris enjoys every moment. He pours himself a glass of Remy Martin, dismantles cashews and pralines and tells me he's a successful businessman with a model wife and a house in Miami, and that he had just returned from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where he had closed a deal to import boneless fish, bursting into laughter as he explains there is no tax on importing boneless fish. I nod in awe and laugh at all his stupid jokes, asking him to stop because I can't concentrate on driving in such a humorous state, until halfway through the journey, as dawn begins to break, I put on a son-of-a-bitch face, suddenly lock the doors, raise the glass partition between us and turn off the main road onto a dirt track...
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