7. Dante
DANTE
My feet clip to a stop. I'm relieved they produce sound again, though I register that Virgil's movements beside me remain silent. Darkness surrounds us, oppressive, total, yet somehow I can still distinguish his features. This Roman poet, millennia dead.
I've decided to engage with this scenario solely because no alternative exists.
Whether I've genuinely died and my afterlife guide happens to be some antiquated writer I vaguely recall from college, or he's merely a coma-induced hallucination, the distinction is irrelevant.
He's the only variable I currently have to work with.
The pragmatic approach: gather data, assess the situation, identify exit strategies. Standard business protocol applied to extraordinary circumstances.
Something pulls at me to step forward. I plant my feet instead, refusing to move.
I’m not a man who follows impulses, certainly not ones imposed by external forces.
This new space at least lacks the bog's repugnant stench, no more rotting organic matter making the air viscous in my lungs.
Though something lingers at the edges. A hint of a scent I might have known once, then forgotten.
"Why have you stopped?" Virgil asks.
I turn toward this man, this cashmere-clad poet who speaks in riddles and sports the slightest hint of a receding hairline.
Somehow it doesn't diminish his attractiveness, which is deeply frustrating.
If my unconscious mind conjured a companion to endure while disconnected from reality, logic dictates it should have produced someone useful rather than beautiful.
Someone like Warren Buffett—disciplined, analytical, a man who built an empire through calculated risk and unwavering principles.
Someone whose presence would serve a functional purpose beyond cryptic philosophy.
Not this overly patient optimist who stares at me with such earnest expectation it grates like nails on glass.
"You didn't answer me. Why do I deserve hell?" He opens his mouth, but I continue. "I don't claim moral superiority. However, I've committed no grave injuries worthy of eternal punishment. Is this because I wasn't religious?"
"Religion has nothing to do with hell," Virgil answers solemnly.
"Then why am I here?"
The possibility has been crystallizing that perhaps I did die.
The shrieking tires, the lights, muffled conversations about checking for a pulse...
and my conspicuous lack of one. The fact that I'm trapped with this man, trudging through a cesspool while he pontificates endlessly about love and music being life's currency, does in fact sound precisely like my version of hell.
"Hell doesn't exist, Dante."
I ignore his continued omission of proper titles as I close the distance between us. He yields a step but not in retreat, more like he’s creating space. "Hell doesn't exist?" I repeat flatly. "Then where are we?"
"Hell," he answers with that same maddening earnestness.
I'm not given to passionate outbursts, but my fists clench of their own accord. My jaw tightens. I have the strongest urge to punch him directly in his dimpled face. Perhaps I do deserve damnation.
He seems to register my frustration. "Both statements are true. I'm afraid there are some things I cannot discuss, not even in whispers, in this place." His voice drops lower with each word. "You'll have to accept my word."
"What value has a poet's word?" Ire sharpens my tone.
Surprisingly, he neither cowers nor sulks.
Instead, he laughs, a deep, genuine sound as he grips his stomach.
"Ah, what value indeed! Though I'd argue many a poet's word has outlasted most emperors' decrees. Homer’s words still breathe after three thousand years.
How long will your quarterly reports endure? "
I scoff. But there's truth in his words.
Already, new financial data replaces mine.
If I'm dead, my assets are being liquidated, redistributed.
My name scrubbed from letterhead, removed from the firm's masthead within days of confirming my death. Standard operational procedure. I take another step forward into the darkness. "Where are we? And don’t say hell. Where precisely?”
"We should be in the genesis, but you stopped."
"The Genesis? Like the book in the Bible?"
He makes that face again, the one that carves deep furrows across his brow and ages him a decade. "I speak not of scripture, but of your own life."
The gravity of his words registers like a physical weight.
I look around properly for the first time.
We stand in what appears to be a vast, empty space.
It’s not the suffocating void of the city streets, but something cavernous.
The darkness isn't complete; it pulses with a dim, indeterminate quality, like standing inside a massive structure where all the lights have been extinguished except one.
The air feels different here, too. Still, expectant. The space itself is holding its breath.
My voice emerges as a rasp. "Which chapter?"
"Continue forward and you will see."
I don't waste breath on a reply. Instead, I move toward what I'm now certain is a dim light ahead, flickering, fluorescent, the kind of industrial lighting that belongs in office buildings or hospitals. My footsteps echo in this emptiness, each one announcing my presence.
I know the space before I see it properly.
Peeling panel walls. Hunter green carpet matted and stained beneath my feet. The acrid waft of cigarette smoke mingling with the sweet-sour stench of cheap whiskey. A stack of glasses all smudged with fingerprints and ash pile alongside unopened mail, balled napkins, and other debris on a TV tray.
And my mother sprawled in the recliner. Her dark hair hangs dull and matted, knotted at the base of her skull, while large clumps spill over her shoulders. She knocks back a drink.
My stomach growls.
"When's dad coming home?" The voice is mine, but from long ago. A small, thin, desperate sound.
She rolls her head toward me. Behind us, a box television—antenna fashioned from a wire coat hanger—drones holiday jingles. A fake Christmas tree leans against the wall in the corner, half its lights dead. I couldn't get it into the stand by myself.
"Your dad's gone, Mikey." Her eyes water, but she clenches her teeth, nostrils flaring. She was beautiful once. I’ve seen photos of her perched on her sister's bike, laughter lighting her face, long legs gleaming with youth and health. I never knew that woman.
I swallow. "Gone where?"
The threat of tears vanishes. She drains her glass and pours more from an open bottle. "He doesn't give a shit about us." Her eyes cut to me with concentrated malice. "Not about me and sure as hell not about you. I don't want to hear his name again, you understand?"
Dangerous territory. The wrong words lead to consequences. But my stomach growls again, insistent.
"We don't have any food." That's the real reason for asking about Dad. Not because the man holds any affection for me.
The sound of his belt sliding through loops echoes through my mind—that slick, shrieking leather. I shudder. Maybe it's better he's gone. But he's the only one who brings money.
Mom sighs, and takes another drink. "I'll go get some when I sober up."
I bite the inside of my cheek until blood blooms. The taste is coppery and bitter, yet it intensifies my hunger.
"When's dad coming home?"
The words escape without my permission. Her eyes water, gaze going distant. "Your dad's gone, Mikey."
Wait. This is familiar. Too familiar. Similar to a video clip stuck on repeat, playing infinitely. Something isn't right. Where was I before this conversation? My room? But I can't remember what my room looks like. Star stickers on the ceiling, I think.
And hadn't I walked in here with someone? That feels right, but I can't remember who. Not my useless father, certainly.
And wait… I don't speak this way either.
I'm six, not a grown man. But, then again, I wrote about this experience once.
In college. The rank smell of alcohol and urine.
The belt sliding from loops. The despondent mother who would drink herself to death years later, during my senior year of high school, but not before starving her child.
Cliché.
The red marks on my paper burn through memory like a brand. How simple it was for that English professor to dismiss my greatest pain with six letters. Some liberal arts academic, some poet. I was forced to take one creative writing class, and he marked my trauma with editorial judgment: cliché.
Cliché until you live it. Until you cry yourself to sleep while hunger gnaws at your stomach.
Until you cower in your father's presence so completely that his disappearance brings relief despite knowing you'll likely starve.
Until you're reduced to stealing green tomatoes from your neighbor's pathetic garden, eating them so fast they leave you vomiting for an entire day.
"Your dad's gone, Mikey." Mom's voice again, eyes watering.
"This isn't real."
The room shudders. The television’s jingle warps, stretching into a metallic whine. The edges of the living room begin to blur, colors bleeding into one another like wet ink. Virgil stands beside me, releasing what sounds like a relieved breath. "You broke the loop."
Tears stream down his face, along his jaw. One catches on his lip, following its curve.
"Can we leave?" I ask, rolling my shoulders back. I am not that boy cowering and begging. And I will never be again.
"I'm so sorry, Dante." Virgil's gaze sweeps the scene. It’s somehow more pitiful knowing he witnesses it.
The empty shelves are stacked with broken plastic cups and grease-stained pizza boxes.
A painting hangs crooked on the wall, some yard-sale special of two cherubs embracing.
The refrigerator hangs open behind us, empty and glaring fluorescent white light onto the sun-faded flooring.
"Save your sympathy." I straighten, putting distance between myself and the recliner.
I'm not Mikey Dante anymore, the starving child from a rust-bucket town whose father abandoned him.
I'm Michael Dante, a man who has doors opened for him, suits custom-tailored, and a refrigerator stocked with chef-prepared meals. "He survived."
Virgil blinks away another tear, his expression solemn. "Until he died and went to hell."
I release a disgusted sigh, then notice a door across the room. A door that doesn't belong. That must be the exit. "I've already survived hell once. I’ll do it again.”